Honoured Society (15 page)

T
HE 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.

In April 1947, Piana dei Greci went to the polls. Despite the appeals to their conscience, the ‘electoral spaghetti’, as it is called, the threats of punitive unemployment, and the gunmen lurking outside the polling stations, their hands on their pistol-butts, the Popular Front
combination
of the parties of the Left, Socialists, Communists and Independents, gained an astonishing and quite unexpected victory. But what the citizens of Piana dei Greci had really voted for was not
Socialism nor Communism, since neither of these terms possessed any clear-cut meaning for them, but the right to wipe out the agonising spectacle of land being allowed to go to waste.

It had been the custom, never abandoned even in the severe days of the Mussolini dictatorship, for the people of Piana dei Greci to join forces with those of San Giuseppe Jato for the celebration of the First of May. San Giuseppe Jato is on the other side of a low mountain pass, about seven miles from Piana dei Greci, and the arrangement had always been for the festivities to take place on a conveniently open place at the top of the pass roughly equidistant from both towns. This spot had the additional advantage of being furnished with a large flat rock which served as a rostrum. As May 1st is observed in Sicily – apart from any political significance it possesses – as the religious feast of Santa Crocefisso, it was difficult for the Fascists to prohibit these gatherings, and the anti-Fascists of the two towns managed to work out a technique by which they could disparage the régime in their May Day speeches, not so much by direct attack, but by sly references.

Often the serious purpose in demonstrations of this kind tends to be engulfed in the holiday spirit. A small responsible minority of males listen to the speeches, and do their best to shush the rest into a respectful silence, but for the majority – for the women, and for the innumerable children – this is the outing of the year, and to be enjoyed as such. Immense time and thought, therefore, go into the preparations; into the sprucing-up of holiday clothes, into the refurbishing of conveyances of all kinds, and into the baking of special feast-day bread and its moulding into decorative shapes. The men who possess them will ride their horses and mules with bells specially attached to their harness, and many of the families will travel in those extraordinary Sicilian carts, every foot of which is covered with paintings of the bloody passages of
knight-errantry
– scenes from the Epic of Roland, or the crusading adventures of Roger the Norman. When they arrive at their destination, stalls selling sweets will be set up, and there will almost certainly be a phrenologist,
and a ballad-singer standing with his guitar in front of a kind of giant cartoon peopled with the stiff and grimacing figures his song will bring to life. For such an occasion the Sicilian is ready to allow himself to be coaxed out of his habit of silence into an almost noisy sociability. After the speechifying comes the picnic, the holiday bread, and the sausage, and the thick new wine. The women will publicly and proudly suckle their babies. There will be card-playing and perhaps horse-racing, and then naps in the shade, where it can be found, before starting home.

This was more or less the way May Day at Portella della Ginestra had always gone, but this time the people of the two towns really had
something
to celebrate. Incredibly, they had beaten the seemingly invincible combination of landowner and Mafia, and now, their leaders assured them, there was no power on earth that could stop them from taking over the uncultivated land. True, the Mafia had issued its official and public warning at San Cipirrello, at an election meeting, when a mafioso called Celeste had said, ‘Vote for the Communists, and we’ll leave you without father or mother.’ But nothing had happened, and it was only later that a
woman of San Giuseppe Jato remembered that early that same morning a rich citizen of the town had not been able to restrain himself from croaking at a flag-waving party of peasants as they passed, ‘Just you wait until you see how things go today.’

But there had been no interference of any kind with the groups of peasants coming singing and playing their guitars up the winding mountain road to Portella, and by half past nine of that tranquil and brilliant morning over two thousand people, more than two-thirds of them children, had reached the open place where the celebrations would be held. At ten o’clock the first speaker, the secretary of the Popular Front, climbed on to the rock platform, and stood waiting while the stewards went off after a group of youths who were fooling with some horses, and others tried to rope in a number of women who were already boiling water for the pasta. Behind the speaker the floor of the pass sloped gently up to a white muddle of rocks topped by the ashen pinnacle of Pizzuta, and facing him, pencilled in on the grey heat mist, were the ridges and stark cliffs of the mountain Cumeta. By ten-fifteen a reasonable audience had been rounded up, the secretary held up his hand, and began his speech.

At that moment a distant popping was heard, an unimportant sound described by those present as resembling that of rockets exploding at a great height. The speaker hesitated and turned his head, distracted, went on, and then stopped again. Francesco Liotta, a seventy-year-old peasant who was standing close to the rostrum, felt his wife tug his sleeve. ‘They’re letting off fireworks for the
festa
, Francesco,’ she said. But then, suddenly, she shrieked and fell down. At the same moment ten-year-old Rigotta Castrense held up her hand to her father, the fingers hanging by bloody ligaments, while her thirteen-year-old friend sprawled suddenly, the lower part of her face carried away. The speaker jumped down from the rostrum as the crowd broke into a babbling confusion, some parents throwing themselves across their children on the ground, others
snatching
them up to run, hardly knowing from what they were trying to escape, or where to run for shelter. Animals were screaming and kicking and spraying their blood over those who rushed to secure them. In this
dolorous, keening commotion, Filippo di Salvo, pointing to something he saw on the slopes of Pizzuta, was caught in the mouth, and dropped dying. Beppino Muchetta, a boy who had been looking after the family cart, came with the news that the horse was dead. ‘We’ve something more than that to weep about, my boy,’ his father said, and then Beppino saw his mother and sister lying on the ground, his mother dead and the sister screaming in agony. Celestina Alotta, aged eleven, separated from her parents, was carried along on a human panic-wave almost to safety, when a random bullet tore through her back. A father with his dead son in his arms, running first one way and then the other, said years later, ‘All I wanted to do was to shield him from being hurt again. I didn’t realise that he was dead all the time.’ Bullets ricocheting off the rocks inflicted atrocious wounds. Sixteen years after the event a participant in this apocalyptic moment recalled the spectacle of an old man staggering past him, both hands pressed over his abdomen to push back the entrails. In ten minutes the shooting was over.

Down in Piana dei Greci, Lieutenant Ragusa, a straightforward young infantry officer, commanded a special anti-bandit squad of thirty-three men. Curiously enough, Lieutenant Ragusa took his orders from the senior carabinieri NCO at Piana, Maresciallo Porchera, and on the previous evening when the Lieutenant had asked whether he should make arrangements for security measures to be taken at the Portella meeting, the police NCO had put him off by saying that such measures were inadvisable. Ragusa, however, was well aware of the fact that demonstrations of any kind in this particular zone were liable to give rise to serious incidents, so, acting on his own initiative, he took what precautions he could by cancelling all leave and confining his men to barracks.

Shortly after ten o’clock on the fateful day, the Lieutenant was coming out of the barber’s when he heard the crackle of distant small-arms fire. Running to the Piazza where he could get an unobstructed view of Portella, he soon saw a sight ‘just like something you see in a film. An
enormous crowd of people was pouring down the road from the
mountain
. Even at that distance you could hear the women screaming. I tried without success to contact the police. There was only one carabiniere and a duty clerk at the station … The carabiniere told me about the massacre, and I got on the telephone to the Inspectorate-General of Public Security at Palermo, to Carabinieri Headquarters, and to my own company commander to ask them to cordon off the whole of the Portella area.’ It was twenty minutes by fast car from Palermo to Piana dei Greci, but five hours before any of the reinforcements requested by Lieutenant Ragusa arrived on the scene.