Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of the death of Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1989), a Sicilian man of letters and radical social critic. Today he is probably best remembered as a novelist, who makes it into anyone’s list of the top five Italian fiction writers of the 20th century. His greatest contribution was to reinvent the detective story as an investigation into a crime whose solution everyone knows, except for the investigator.
Sciascia’s investigators never turn up for a second novel. Sometimes they’re killed, other times they’re transferred by their superiors before they can make the decisive arrest. In one case, the narrator tells us that he is the murderer, although we have every reason to think the confession is not to be taken at face value.
In a broad sense, all Sciascia’s crime novels are Mafia novels, even if the very existence of the organisation is denied (by one character or another) in many of them. The novels pit a cold, hidden Machiavellian reason, without a human face (or with too many faces for an arrest to be possible), against an isolated investigator who is committed to enlightened reason – paradoxically, way too much for his commitment to be reasonable. The Sciascian hero is a romantic rationalist.
The novels therefore proceed in the reverse direction of most crime novels. They begin with clarity about the crime and proceed to enter a cloud of suspicion, innuendo and an everlasting growth in the list of possible suspects. It’s a journey from light to darkness.
The investigator finds he cannot trust his superiors, or the doctor, or the magistrate he confides in. Even a widow or a priest might suddenly appear sinister. Betrayal is everywhere.
In a Sciascia novel, the identity of the killer is almost irrelevant. So is, to a lesser extent, the mastermind. It is society that ends up in the dock: society as a conspiracy against a scapegoat, who is progressively isolated for refusing to become complicit.
It’s important to remember that Sciascia is writing about a ‘Mafia society’ rather than a ‘Mafia state’. Readers familiar with modern sociological descriptions of Mafias around the world – or simply the news about men of violence such as Totò Riina – might be puzzled by Sciascia’s fictional depictions of Mafiosi as literate men, occupying social positions of respect – judges, prosecutors, priests, say.
Collusion was part of the weave of everyday life. This society, based on ‘respect’, apportioned everything
Nor does he portray them as men under the command of violent men of the underworld. His Mafia is not an organisation that has captured society. It is society.
Sciascia wrote about a Mafia that was dominant before World War II, and still present during his writing life. It was made up of made men and hoodlums but also of doctors, lawyers, nobility and even, at times, monks and bishops.
The travel writer, Norman Lewis, has given more detail of this Sicily, which he witnessed personally, as a World War II Allied army officer and through family ties.
He writes of the doctors who tended wounded criminals without reporting them to the police. They certified the myopia of women who thus needed ‘assistance’ at the voting booth. One noted respected doctor injected a panic-stricken boy, who witnessed a murder, with a ‘sedative’ that was fatal.
Lawyers transferred shady money or property through their legal offices. Friars delivered ‘messages’ (extortions) through the confessional. One bishop (at the behest of a notable Mafia don) convinced a reluctant notable to switch votes by allowing his daughter the star role at the blessing of the new cathedral bell.
Collusion was part of the weave of everyday life. This society, based on ‘respect’, apportioned everything. The term ‘pizzo’ (the ‘commission’ paid on everything) came from an expression that meant ‘to dip one’s beak’ and get a sip of everything. Even a car-parker or a beggar could be guaranteed the monopoly on a patch of territory, guaranteed not to be disturbed by competition or policemen.
Lewis says you could always tell an ‘honoured man’ by two telltale signs. One was a quiet voice, accompanied by a cold look of confidence, that came from a sense of impunity. It was with such look that one unsuspected Mafioso told an armed robber not to touch him – with the robber lowering his gun and silently moving away.
The other sign was incredible luck in business, medical practice, winning tenders, anything such men put their hand to. Nothing could go wrong.
None of this would have been possible, however, without the whole society accepting this state of affairs as the natural one. They accepted mayors known to be members of the ‘party of honour’, distributing favours and jobs in return for silence and votes. The ordinary people never heard anything, didn’t see anything, even (in one notorious case) when the corpse lay literally between their feet.
As for the journalists, they tripped over themselves to depict the death of a boss – such as Don Calogero Vizzini (1877-1947) – as the death of a philantropic saint.
It is this world that Sciascia depicted in portraits of sublime horror. He wrote quickly – researching and cogitating during the winter months and writing his books in the summer, barely revising. Sometimes, as a result, he comes off as pat. For example, his novel Todo Modo (1974; One Way Or Another) doesn’t cohere or convince. But even this relative failure contains flashes of literary genius – among other passages, one of the best depictions of a diabolical procession (a Christian Democrat prayer group) since Milton described the fallen angels entering hell.
Sciascia writes of the drama of discovering that the people you trusted have made, like Faust, a pact with the devil. It’s a strange pact – not for extraordinary powers but for protection. It’s the acceptance of mediocrity as destiny, as long as you’re left alone.
In time, of course, this ‘honoured society’ – so proud never to dabble in prostitution or petty crimes – was taken over by gangsters, originally apprenticed in the US. The doctor who poisoned the child was murdered, 10 years later, by an ambitious thug who saw the doctor’s scruples as an obstacle. Car bombs, with honourable men as victims, became so frequent that the sight of an oddly parked Alfa Romeo warranted a call to the police.
Sciascia depicted the takeover in a variety of ways – as a ‘Western’, as thriller and as mystery. Like Georges Simenon (whom he studied closely), he took a popular genre and transformed the police procedural into a modern form of Greek tragedy. For us, of course, living a life a million lives away from all this, reading Sciascia can simply be escapist entertainment.