Book 10: Il Giorno della Civetta (The Day of the Owl, 1961)

Apparently people used to seriously deny the existence of the Mafia — even in the heart of Sicily. Either it wasn't actually real, as many absurdly maintained, or its reality was so entombed in silence (the notorious omerta) that it may as well have been sheer myth.

That was before mobsters had become an ethnic cliche and organized-crime an entertainment franchise.

Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia's "The Day of the Owl" appeared during the reign of silence — and apparently played a significant role in shattering it. It's an impressive example of how a skillful, poignant piece of fiction can give people the courage to face reality.

"Is it really possible," one of Sciascia's characters wonders, "to conceive of the existence of a criminal association so vast, so well-organized, so secret and so powerful that it can dominate not only half of Sicily, but the entire United States of America?"

The questioner's tone is mocking and scornful, but the question is the driving force of the novel, or rather, the novel itself becomes the answer: Yes, it is possible to conceive of such a thing.

The story is simple: A man running through a crowded square gets shot to death, and everyone pretends nothing happened. No one knows anything. No one saw anything. It's as though the collective denial of a fact can simply erase the fact. Except one man doesn't see it that way. Maybe because he's new to Sicily and doesn't know any better. Or maybe because he's a man of principle who takes his job as a police officer seriously. As the novel progresses, we realize it's a little of both.

The man in question, a Captain Bellodi, is from mainland Italy. "Mainlanders," we are told, "are decent enough but just don't understand things." And not only is he from the mainland, but he's from Parma, the northern part of the mainland. "A polenta eater!" say the spaghetti-eating Sicilians with derision. (Again, we see the pervasive theme of the North-South divide in Italian literature.)

So no one saw anything or knows anything. And even granting that "nothing" happened, there's still a corpse to be explained. The typical explanation for a dead body in Mafia-controlled Sicily is the "crime of passion." If a guy shows up dead, it's obviously because he was sleeping with the wife of some other guy, who decided, quite reasonably in macho Italy, to take revenge. Produce the other guy, slap his wrist, case closed.

But Bellodi has other ideas. He has reason to think the man was murdered not in the heat of passion but because the man, an honest and skilled contractor, refused to pay protection money to the local mob. And Bellodi is right. The rest of the novel is his unraveling of the shooting and his demonstration of how the vast crime network goes all the way to the top of the government. Not only that. But that the network, the crime "family," is the very structure of Sicilian society. "The only institution in the Sicilian conscience that really counts is the family; counts, that is to say, more as a juridical contract or bond than as a natural association based on affection. The family is the Sicilian's State."

The Mafia is family, a "secret society for mutual aid," seen as the only source of justice. If you are good to it, it will be good to you. People who depend on the government or police for help are seen as betraying the family to "corrupt" outsiders. This, along with the notion of "paying for protection," is an idea we see in later works about the Mafia, most notably in the opening scene of Mario Puzo's "The Godfather," in which Don Corleone, with his deep sense of justice, is shown like a king of old listening to the grievances of his serfs. The guy who chooses to deal with the police instead of with the family doesn't fare well.

I actually read Puzo's book before reading Sciascia's. It's gripping and entertaining until the last third, which weirdly drops down the rungs from mass-market fun to out-and-out drivel. The drivel is happily absent from the famous film that shaped so much of our cultural awareness of the Mafia. And drivel is nowhere to be seen in Sciascia's slim 120-page literary volume. But Puzo's 500-page tome has a clear debt to Sciascia's, not just in the big ideas, but in some small details as well — for example, the lupara guns that are used in both books, the emphasis on street smarts vs. formal education, and the "pure-hearted" Mafia don in "The Day of the Owl" who quirkily drinks a strong double espresso every half hour. Sciascia's don has his coffee; Puzo's has his garden and his gentle manners. And every Mafia don since then, up to Tony Soprano, has been an identifiable mix of ruthless, quirky and lovable.

Ultimately, Sciascia's Captain Bellodi is thwarted. One of the key participants turns out to have a phony, yet ironclad, alibi — paid for by the mob, of course — and Bellodi ends up leaving Sicily for a while. By novel's end, though, he misses the sunny rawness of the island and knows he will return to it. It's not clear, though, whether he is returning to fight or to peacefully admit defeat.

The title comes from Shakespeare's "Henry VI, Part III."

And he that will not fight for such a hope
Go home to bed, and like the owl by day
If he arise, be mocked and wondered at.

Is Bellodi the owl who flies by day? And is such an owl a laudable exception, or just a freak of nature?

Book 9: La Luna e i Falò (The Moon and the Bonfires, 1950)

"One needs a town, if only for knowing the pleasures of leaving it."

Cesare Pavese is regarded as one of Italy's pre-eminent writers, not just for his novels and poetry, but also for his translations of American authors into Italian, most notably Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. Apparently he never actually set foot in America, a source of utter amazement to me after reading "The Moon and the Bonfires," which contains so many piquant descriptions of life in the States, particularly of California and its "cities sparkling along the coast." The last coast, he calls it, the end of the world.

The novel is about a desperately poor Italian boy, a bastard left at a foundling hospital, who goes to America as a young man. "In America, the beauty of it is, they're all bastards." He makes a fortune there — it's not quite clear how, although bathtub gin is mentioned — and returns in the late 1940s to his rural village in northern Italy. Everything has changed. Even his beloved hazel trees are gone. Mere, and mostly sad, reminders of what used to be are all that remain. The narrator — referred to only as the "eel" or "the American" — has the classic "you can't go home again" realization. "Could I make anyone understand that what I wanted was only to see something I'd seen before? To see carts, to see haylofts, to see a wine tub, an iron fence, a chicory flower, a checked blue handkerchief, a drinking gourd, the handle of a hoe?"

As the novel progresses, it's not clear how much change is from World War II (and Italy being on the wrong side) and how much is a product of the narrator's altered perspective from aging and living abroad.

The change from the war is considerable, almost overwhelming. The narrator observes: "The first thing I said when I got off the boat at Genoa among houses smashed by the war was that every house, every courtyard, every terrace had meant something to someone, and that even more than physical ruin and the dead, you hate to think of so many years of living, so many memories wiped out out like that in one night without leaving a sign."

But then he continues with a sense, born of his time abroad, that such devastation is not determinative: "Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's better that way, better for everything to go up in a bonfire of dry grass and for people to begin again. That's how it was in America — when you were sick of something, a job or a place, you changed it. Over there even whole towns, with taverns, city halls and stores, are as empty now as graveyards."

The landscape, the familiar physical world ("a well-hoed, well-tended vineyard, with the right leaves and that smell of the earth baked by an august sun") are important to a feeling of "home," but it's people, the extremely rare ones who can be counted on, who give life its sense of continuity and solidity.

The narrator finds this with his childhood friend Nuto, now a grown man but with the same heart and charm as when he was a kid.

The narrator had learned a love of knowledge and the value of curiosity from Nuto, who had advised "You'll always be a good-for-nothing if you don't read books."

And he learned humility and quietness: "Nuto: when he said something he'd end with: 'If I'm wrong, let me know.' That's how I began to understand that you don't just talk to talk, to say 'I did this, I did that, I ate and drank,' but you talk to find an idea, to learn how the world works."

It's so simple, but the narrator's description of what it's like to have a best friend is still the best I've ever read: "Just listening to these talks and being Nuto's friend, knowing him so well, was like drinking wine and hearing music played."

*************

This was Cesare Pavese's last book. I've read that he was in love with the American actress Constance Dowling, at left, with whom he had an affair while she was working in Italy after the war. Her ending the relationship is said to have been the reason for his fatal overdose of sleeping pills in 1950. One of his last poems, eerily, was titled "Death Will Come and Look at Me with Your Eyes."

Less eerie, but crazy beautiful, and relevant to this last novel as a meditation on home and belonging is his poem "Nocturne":

Nocturne

The hill is like night against the clear sky.
Your head framed against it, barely moving,
and moving with the sky. You are like a cloud
seen between branches. In your eyes the laughter
and strangeness of a sky that is not yours.

The hill of earth and leaves halts
your bright gaze with its dark mass,
your mouth has the curve of a gentle hollow
between distant slopes. You seem to play
with the great hill and the clearness of the sky:
to please me you echo the ancient background
and make it purer.

But you live elsewhere.
Your gentle blood came from elsewhere.
The words you say have no meeting-point
with the rugged sadness of this sky.
You are only a white and sweetly gentle cloud
entangled one night among ancient branches.