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?
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