The Sacco Gang

by Andrea Camilleri

  ALSO BY

  ANDREA CAMILLERI

  The Revolution of the Moon

  Europa Editions

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  New York NY 10001

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2013 by Sellerio Editore, Palermo

  First publication 2018 by Europa Editions

  Translation by Stephen Sartarelli

  Original Title: La banda Sacco

  Translation copyright © 2018 by Europa Editions

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco

  www.mekkanografici.com

  Cover image: Sicilian ex voto, mixed media on tin, 1854.

  Milicia Santuary, Altavilla Milicia, Palermo

  ISBN 9781787700123

  Andrea Camilleri

  THE SACCO GANG

  Translated by Stephen Sartarelli

  THE SACCO GANG

  HOW IT ALL HAPPENED

  I

  A FAMILY’S RISE

  In the late nineteenth century, Luigi Sacco is little more than a savvy, quick-witted lad working as a seasonal day laborer on farms in the countryside around Raffadali, the town of his birth. His only wealth is his youth, two strong arms, and a keen desire to work. In every other regard, he has nothing. Not even a pair of shoes.

  But he is head over heels in love with a beautiful girl by the name of Antonina Randisi, a day laborer like him, who returns his affections.

  The two would like to get married and have a great many children, but they are short on money, earning barely enough to stay alive and retain at least that minimum of strength necessary to work from morning till night.

  Life is hard for a day laborer.

  First of all, work is not constant year-round, but, as mentioned, seasonal.

  This means that you work for three months for your daily half loaf of bread and sardine, and then you don’t work for three months and eat nothing except, with any luck, a crust of bread and a little chicory.

  Come harvest time (for almonds, fava beans, olives, grapes, wheat), the day laborers gather in an appointed place, which is usually a square in town, and wait for the overseers to show up on behalf of the landowners and “form a crew,” that is, recruit a number of people, men as well as women, and take them out to the fields.

  One’s chances of being chosen depend entirely on the overseer, who won’t always select the day laborers for their productive capacity or desire to earn the paltry pay, but rather on the basis of a whispered word from a mafioso, or a friend, or a friend of a friend. Or else he’ll just make up his mind on his own, depending on whether someone is to his liking or not.

  On the other hand, anyone who has ever even tried to reason with an overseer—that is, discuss the pay or the work schedule, or complain of some abuse of power or other outrage—can forget about ever being called up again. He or she might as well stay in bed and get a little extra sleep.

  Work begins at the first light of day and ends at nightfall.

  A break of only one hour is allowed, to eat and attend to one’s needs.

  But what do the day laborers eat?

  A one-kilo loaf of bread with one salted sardine and one hard-boiled egg.

  Here’s how it goes: with the first three quarters of the loaf, one enjoys only the flavor of the sardine and the egg. With each bite of bread, the laborer licks the sardine or puts the egg in his mouth, tosses it around with his tongue, and then extracts it still whole.

  The teeth come into play only with the last quarter of the loaf.

  He also drinks water, which is kept cool in a jug.

  Sometimes, though rarely, the owner is generous and offers a calatina—that is, something to go with the bread, usually consisting of a bit of caponata or a bowl of maccu, a porridge of fava beans cooked in water and reduced to a kind of mush, with a tiny dab of olive oil on top.

  If the day’s work in the field carries over to the next day, the day laborers sleep under the stars. And sometimes somebody will sing:

  At night I lie beneath the sky;

  the stars above become my roof;

  my pillow a bitter thistle bush . . .

  The luckiest, or the oldest, take refuge in a hayloft for the night.

  *

  One day Luigi is told that Don Agatino, an elderly, venerated grafter of pistachio trees, wants to talk to him.

  It is important to know that pistachio trees are divided into male and female, and that one male tree, which Sicilians call a scornabecco, is enough for eight females.

  Before a female tree can produce fruit, it must live for at least twelve years. But in the twelfth year, before anything else, it must be grafted, otherwise it won’t produce anything.

  The female tree, however, is capricious. The graft will either take on the first try, or, if it doesn’t, it means the tree wishes to remain unwedded, and there’s no way you can ever get it to change its mind.

  Twelve years down the drain, tending a sterile tree.

  Anyone who owns a pistachio grove, however, is sitting on a gold mine. The pistachio nut is very much in demand, and fetches a very high price.

  An acknowledged master of the art of pistachio grafting, Don Agatino has just lost his assistant, who picked up and emigrated to America. And so he offers to teach Luigi, who he has heard is an honest, hardworking lad, the art of grafting, so he can take his place.

  Luigi accepts the offer without a second thought, mostly because the pay Don Agatino is proposing is quite good and could change his life entirely.

  And so he goes on to learn a new trade.

  Just three months are enough for Luigi Sacco to understand all there is to know about the art of grafting, and another three months to surpass his teacher, as Don Agatino himself will honestly admit.

  Shortly thereafter, the master, old and financially secure, retires, passing all of his work on to Luigi.

  Luigi’s fame as a miracle-working grafter who never makes a mistake spreads fast. Soon, it’s no longer small pistachio groves he’s called upon to graft, but veritable forests of pistachio, at Santo Stefano Quisquina, Cattolica Eraclea, and other towns in the province.

  But what started out as a craft for earning a living very soon becomes for Luigi a passion with no material interest.

  For a while now, to go to work, he has to pass by a pistachio grove belonging to a judge by the name of Vassallo. But it’s a dead grove, because the grafters the judge had hired grafted the trees at the wrong time. Luigi, however, realizes that the grove could still be revived, and so, without telling anyone, he grafts the trees at the right moment.

  Therein lies the art: intuiting just the right moment for cutting—not a day too soon or too late.

  A few days later the judge’s overseer runs to his boss and tells him how the pistachio grove has re-blossomed miraculously.

  The judge then summons his grafters and asks which of them was the clever one. But they all admit that it wasn’t them. By roundabout means, the judge learns that it was Luigi, and so he wants to meet him. He congratulates him, thanks him, and then asks him how much he owes him for his efforts.

  “Nothing.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I did that work for my own pleasure, not on your orders.”

  And he won’t accept so much as a cent.

  At this point Luigi, thanks to his skills, has enough money to build himself a little hous
e and finally marry his Antonina.

  *

  Meanwhile, however, starved as he is for work, he discovers another trade that earns well and that he can practice between one grafting job and another.

  It’s so strange a trade that, to hear of it, one feels immediately like laughing: flycatcher.

  It was a pharmacist and owner of a pistachio grove he’d tended who made him the proposal.

  “You feel like catching flies for me?”

  Luigi gave him a puzzled look.

  “Are you joking, sir?”

  The pharmacist explained that the flies he’s supposed to catch land on the leaves of elder bushes and suck them. They are very rare, and they show up in those parts only a few days a year, in April and May.

  The pharmacist then led him into the room at the back of his shop and showed him a dead fly.

  “This is the kind of fly you need to catch. It’s called a Spanish Fly. And it’s not easy to find, as I said. For every fly you bring me, I’ll pay you well.”

  “What’s it for?”

  The pharmacist laughed.

  “It’s for making a sixty-year-old man make love like a strapping youth of twenty. We chemists make a powder out of these flies that sells for its weight in gold. But you can only take it in tiny doses, otherwise it can be deadly.”

  *

  By dint of catching flies and grafting pistachio trees, Luigi is soon in a position to buy, on the strength of his word, a nice big plot of land, four sarme1 large. It all needs to be tilled and hoed, however, as the land has not enjoyed any daily human care for years and years.

  He is able to buy it on credit because the owner has great faith in Luigi’s honesty.

  “You can pay me in installments when you have the money.”

  In the meantime, Luigi and Antonina’s marriage has produced five sons and one daughter. They are, in order of birth: Vincenzo, Salvatore, Giovanni, Girolamo, Filomena, and Alfonso.

  As they start to grow up, the children, not the kind to take things easy, endowed as they are with a great desire to work and to get ahead in life, begin to help their father in his labors.

  Now properly tilled, their land has a vineyard, an inevitable pistachio grove, and an almond orchard.

  Luigi buys two donkeys and a mule.

  The little house, meanwhile, has been greatly expanded. There is also now a warehouse and a stable for the animals.

  *

  Then, to help his father pay the installments on the land and rid him as soon as possible of his debt burden, Salvatore emigrates to the United States when still practically a child and stays there for nine years.

  He works like a slave and always sends money home.

  A short while later, Vincenzo leaves for Argentina, where he will stay for eight years.

  He too, following his brother Salvatore’s example, sends home as much money as he can.

  That leaves Giovanni, known as “Vanni,” and Girolamo, to help their father work the fields. Alfonso is still too small to hold a heavy hoe in his hands.

  And, besides, his father has another fate in mind for him. An ambitious one, for those times.

  Luigi wants this son to study, with the support of his family and brothers, until he obtains a degree in law.

  The Saccos are all barely capable of signing their own names, they do not know how to read or write, and they suffer a great deal from being practically illiterate.

  In his Memorial, Alfonso writes that of the great mass of day laborers in his town, only one, a man of socialist ideas, could read the newspaper, ever so slowly, and the amazing thing was that the laborers all thought that this was natural and right—that is, that only “gentlemen” should be able to read and understand the newspaper.

  *

  When World War I breaks out, Salvatore (who has just returned from the United States), Giovanni, and Girolamo are drafted into the army and leave for the front.

  As a result, Alfonso is forced to abandon his studies and go and help his father, who is now alone, since Vincenzo is still in Argentina.

  But by the end of the War they’re all back together, Vin­cenzo included. Girolamo was injured in battle, and is now considered “seriously disabled.”

  *

  In the fields, where father and sons continue to work side by side in perfect harmony, they build more houses, one right next to the other, and some new stables.

  Three of these houses are for Vincenzo, Giovanni, and Filomena, who in the meantime have got married.

  They have also built a vat for making wine.

  And a great hive colony with fifty honeycombs.

  And they have bought another mule, four cows, and two horses, who would go on to sire two mules a year.

  Salvatore, together with a friend who knows how to run the machinery, sets up a mill in a warehouse in the center of town, which, thanks to the location, begins to earn well.

  Vincenzo, aside from working as a distributor for the Socialist cooperative (the Saccos all have socialist ideas) is also a good photographer, having learned the craft in Argentina, and earns good money at it, immortalizing weddings, baptisms, and funerals.

  Giovanni then gets a brilliant idea.

  Transportation to the provincial capital of Girgenti (today called Agrigento) consists of an old horse-drawn coach that carries mail as well as passengers, leaving in the morning and returning in the evening. It takes half a day each way.

  But there are great many people forced to stay put each day, because the coach can’t carry more than eight passengers.

  And so, Giovanni, not wanting to do the coach’s owner a bad turn, forms a partnership with him and, along with a few other friends, buys a bus capable of making two entire round trips daily between Raffadali and Girgenti.

  And since it also cooperates with the postal service, Giovanni’s company receives an annual state subsidy of 20,000 lire.

  Shortly thereafter, still with the same company, Giovanni buys a truck for transporting goods along the same route as the bus.

  Come harvest time, however, they all go back to being farmers.

  At midday and in the evenings, the family always meets back up around the same dining table, the married siblings all sitting with their spouses.

  They all live in houses one right next to the other on their common land.

  There is never a quarrel, never a row between them.

  They are known in town for being honest, serious people who always, infallibly, honor their word.

  By this point the Saccos are well off.

  They had to sweat their way to get there, but they’re hardly the type to enjoy their comfort and be satisfied with that.

  Vanni has a few other ideas in his head. He wants to buy at least two more buses and create some new lines to other towns nearby.

  *

  But there was the Mafia.

  1An ancient unit of measure (salma in Italian), varying regionally from between 1 and 4 hectares in area. (Translator’s note.)

  II

  BUT THERE WAS THE MAFIA

  Boy, was there ever!

  In the early 1920s Raffadali is entirely under the rule of the Mafia, which has replaced the government in every facet of life.

  The Mafia has imposed its “code of honor” on the community, which applies, of course, to those belonging to the “honorable society,” but also dictates the rules of everyday behavior for regular citizens.

  For example, to resolve a family dispute, one no longer turns in private to the marshal of the Carabinieri, as used to be the case, but to the Mafia boss. Who then decides, in his own way, how to solve the problem. And his judgement, once pronounced, is without appeal.

  Anyone who might rebel against such a verdict almost always risks his life, because the Mafia boss’s word is sacred. It is gospel, and can never
be contradicted or questioned.

  You can’t even go to the Carabinieri to report a burglary or the theft of your livestock. You always have to inform the Mafia boss about the matter first, whereupon he will either decide to resolve the problem personally himself, or will himself grant you permission to go and talk to the Carabinieri.

  The Mafia even got involved in people’s private lives and would often prohibit a marriage from taking place, or stop an individual from buying a plot of land or opening a shop.

  In short, the Mafia boss wore a number of different faces: one minute he was a benevolent, accommodating patriarch, the next a skilled, wise mediator, the next a harsh judge, and most often a savage executioner.

  But he was always, no matter what, a ruthless extortionist.

  *

  Such was the way of the old Mafia—the Mafia of the great estates and countrysides.

  And Raffadali is a town that lives exclusively on its farming activities. It isn’t just the big landowners who have to pay the racket, but their sharecroppers as well, and even peasants owning a scrap of land no bigger than a postage stamp.

  In town, shop owners and businessmen all have to bend to the racket.

  At the time, the Mafia used to resort to anonymous letters, which were as ungrammatical as they were threatening, to exact the percentage they claimed was their right.

  Whoever did not pay at once became the target of certain special warnings, such as seeing his harvest burnt up, his trees chopped down, or his animals’ throats cut.

  If, after such warnings, no concrete gestures were forthcoming—that is, if none of the requested payments were made—the Mafia would then murder a random member of the family refusing to pay.