The Day of the Owl (6 page)

Pizzuco, who had invited him to a bitter vermouth at the Cafe Gulino, as so often in the past, was astounded at
Parrinieddu's
refusal and abrupt flight; though not particularly bright, he wondered about it for the rest of the day.
Parrinieddu,
for his part, was so rattled that he spent the day attributing sinister meanings to that offer of a bitter vermouth, bitter betrayal, bitter death, overlooking the well-known fact that Pizzuco suffered from what the doctors called cirrhosis due to his fondness for Averna's bitter vermouth - a beverage which made him proclaim his faith as Separatist and ex-soldier of the Volunteer Army for Sicilian Independence; though according to police records he had merely been a minor accomplice of the bandit Giuliano.

Many others noticed
Parrinieddu's
peculiar behaviour, his apprehensive walk like someone with a mastiff at his heels; those who feared him and wished to avoid him noticed it most. Then had come that meeting with the man he feared most, a man capable of knowing - or guessing - what had been said in confidence between office walls. He had pretended not to see him, turned a corner at once; but the other had seen him, and followed him with his impassive gaze from beneath heavily-lidded eyes.

Since that meeting, the informer's last twenty-four hours had been all anguished frenzy. Longing for flight, which he knew to be impossible, alternated with visions of himself as a corpse. Flight was in the prolonged whistle of a train, in the countryside unfolding from the train window, towns rolling slowly by full of bright flowers and women at windows; then, suddenly, along came a tunnel, the word death hammered by the rhythm of the train, and death's black waters closing over him.

Without realizing it, by three days of anxiety, of false steps, of visible apprehension and nervousness, he had dug his own grave. Now he thought he'd be shot down, 'like a dog'; but he thought death was coming to him because of his betrayal, that it was known or suspected, and not because his terror had turned to madness and he had become the living image of treachery. The two names he had let slip were only in the memory of Captain Bellodi who, not wishing to have another corpse on his hands, had every intention of protecting the informer; but
Parrinieddu,
his nerves ragged from anxiety, saw his information floating round like chaff. Beyond hope, at dawn of what was to be his last day, he wrote the captain two names on a flimsy sheet of airmail paper, and the words: 'I'm dead', then, as if finishing off a letter, ended 'With regards, Calogero Dibella'. He posted the letter while the town was still deserted; all that day he spent either wandering about the streets, or rushing home a dozen times, determined to shut himself up there, then coming out as many times to get himself killed once and for all; just when he had finally made up his mind to hide, two unerring pistol shots got him on his own doorstep.

The captain read the letter only after hearing of the death. After giving instructions to the sergeantmajor of B. to arrest Marchica, Captain Bellodi, tired out, returned to C. and went straight to his quarters. When told of Dibella's death, he went down to the office; and there was the letter in the afternoon's post. It gave him a great shock.

The man had left this life with one final denunciation, the most accurate and explosive one he had ever made. The two names were in the middle of the page and, beneath, almost at the foot, that desperate message, the 'regards' and the signature. It was not the importance of the denunciation which made such an impression on the captain, but the agony, the despair which had provoked it. Those 'regards' made him feel brotherly compassion and anguished distress, the compassion and distress of one who under appearances classified, defined and rejected, suddenly discovers the naked tragic human heart. By his death, by his last farewell, the informer had come into a closer, more human relationship; this might be unpleasant, vexatious; but in the feelings and thoughts of the man who shared them they brought a response of sympathy, of spiritual sympathy.

Suddenly this state of mind gave way to rage. The captain felt a wave of resentment at the narrow limits in which the law compelled him to act; like his subordinates he found himself longing for exceptional powers, exceptional liberty of action; a longing he had always condemned in them. A few months' suspension in Sicily of constitutional guarantees, and the evil could be uprooted forever. Then he remembered Mori's repression of the mafia under fascism and rejected this alternative. But his anger smouldered on, his Northerner's anger against the whole of Sicily, the only region in the whole of Italy actually to have been given liberty during the fascist dictatorship, the liberty of safety of life and property. How many other liberties this liberty of theirs had cost, the Sicilians did not know or want to know. In the dock at the assizes they had seen all the
Dons
and
zii,
the election riggers and even those Commanders of the Order of the Crown of Italy, the doctors and lawyers who intrigued with or protected the underworld. Weak or corrupt magistrates had been dismissed; complaisant officials removed. For peasant, smallholder, shepherd and sulphur-miner, dictatorship had spoken this language of freedom.

'And perhaps that's why there are so many fascists in Sicily,' thought the captain. 'They never saw fascism as buffoonery or, like us, lived out its full tragic consequences after September 8th; but it's not only that. It's because in the condition they were in, one liberty was enough, they would not have known what to do with any others.' But this was not an objective opinion.

As he pursued these thoughts, at times clear and at others confused, for he lacked knowledge, he was already on his way through the night to S., a night which the cold white headlights made even vaster and more mysterious, an endless vault of splendid crystals and of glittering apparitions.

The sergeantmajor of S. had had a terrible day, and was about to wade through an even worse night, with silent insidious waters of sleep waiting to drown him at any moment. From the neighbouring town he had brought in Marchica who, to tell the truth, had caused no trouble and, indeed, seemed half asleep like a puppy at its mother's dugs: he had gone peacefully into the guardroom and, even before the door was closed behind him, thrown himself, like a sack of bones, on the plank bed.

And, as if Marchica were not enough, the last straw for the sergeantmajor had been another corpse. It was enough to drive the most placid of men crazy; but the sergeantmajor, with his pangs of hunger and his weariness, just felt sleepy. Then just as he was slipping off for a cup of coffee he was stopped on the very threshold of the bar by the voice of the captain, who had arrived that minute, which showed what an unlucky star he had, at least in his relations with his superiors. Instead, the captain joined him in a coffee, and insisted on paying for both, in spite of the barman saying what a pleasure it was for the bar to offer a coffee impersonally to the
Signor Capitano
and the
Signor Maresciallo,
thus making the sergeantmajor's ill humour foam silently like a glass of beer. 'Now he'll think I come in here and drink free,' he was thinking. But the captain had quite other worries.

The body of
Parrinieddu,
covered by a bluish cloth, still lay on the pavement. The carabiniere picket raised the cloth; the body was contracted in the dark womb of death as though in prenatal sleep. 'I'm dead,' he had written, and here he was dead by his own doorstep. Through the closed windows came the moans of his wife, and the murmur of neighbours hurried in to comfort her. The captain looked at the body for a moment, then made a sign for it to be covered again. The sight of the dead always disturbed him, particularly this one. Followed by the sergeantmajor, he went back to barracks.

His plan was this: to arrest forthwith the two mentioned in
Parrinieddu's
farewell message and interrogate, separately and almost simultaneously, under conditions and in a way which he had already carefully worked out, both of them and the third man already under arrest. The sergeantmajor considered the arrest of Rosario Pizzuco an easy matter, that is to say, without troublesome consequences. But, with the second name, the one that the informer had only had the courage to write when dead, he had visions of successive calamities rolling down from one step to another like a rubber ball, till finally they bounced up into the face of SergeantMajor Arturo Ferlisi, commanding the Carabiniere Station of S.; not for much longer, the way things were going. In his bewilderment he took upon himself to point out respectfully the consequences to the captain. The captain had already weighed them up. There was nothing for it, then, but to tie up the donkey where its owner wanted it; SergeantMajor Ferlisi felt he was tying it up amid a lot of crockery and that the effect of its kick would be something to remember for the rest of his days.

*

'I just can't understand, it's unthinkable; a man like Don Mariano Arena, upright, devoted to family and parish, old too, and with so many infirmities and crosses to bear ... And they arrest him like a common criminal while, if you'll forgive my saying so, there are so many real ones walking around under our very noses, or rather yours. But I do know how much you personally try to do and I appreciate your work highly, even though it's not for me to give it its full due.'

'Thank you, but we all do our best.'

'No, let me have my say ... When in the middle of the night they knock up an honoured household, yes, honoured, and pull out of bed a poor creature who's also aged and decrepit, and drag him off to jail like a common criminal, causing anguish and consternation to an entire family; no, no, it's not only inhuman, it's rank injustice ...'

'But there are well-founded suspicions that...'

'Founded? Where and how? Say someone goes out of his mind and sends you a note with my name on it; then you come along here, at dead of night, and, old as I am, without regard for my past record as a citizen, drag me off to jail as if I were anyone ...'

'Well, to tell the truth, there
are
some stains on Arena's record ...'

'Stains? Listen to me, my friend, let me talk as a Sicilian and as a man in my position, if that offers any guarantee. The famous Mori wasted blood and tears in these parts ... That was one of the sides of fascism on which it's better not to dwell; and, mark you, I'm no detractor of fascism; some newspapers, in fact, even go as far as to call me one myself... And was there no good in fascism? Indeed there was, and how ... Now this rabble who call liberty the mud they sling about to besmirch the finest people and the purest sentiments ... But don't let's go into that... Mori, as I was saying, was a scourge of God here; he swept up all and sundry, guilty and innocent, honest and dishonest, according to his own whims and his spies ... It was a catastrophe for the whole of Sicily, my friend ... And now you come and talk to me of stains. What stains? If you knew Don Mariano Arena as I do, you'd not talk of stains. He's a man, let me tell you, of whom there are few of his kind about. I'm not referring to the integrity of his faith, which to you, rightly or wrongly, may be a matter of indifference; but to his honesty, his love for others, his wisdom ... An exceptional man, I assure you. All the more so when one considers that he is uneducated, uncultured ... but you know how more important a pure heart is than any culture ... Now the arrest of a man like that as a common criminal, and I'm speaking with all sincerity, takes me right back to Mori's times ... '

'But public opinion says that he is a head of the mafia ...'

'Public opinion! What is this public opinion? Rumours in the air, rumours which spread calumny, defamation, cheap vengeance. Anyway, what
is
the mafia? Just another rumour. Everyone says it exists, but where no one knows ... Rumours, will-o'-the-wisp rumours echoing in empty heads, believe me. D'you know what Vittorio Emanuele Orlando used to say? I'll quote you his very words and, far in time as we are from his ideas, when repeated by us they take on even more authority. He used to say -'

'But, from what I have been able to gather from certain phenomena, the mafia
does
exist.'

'You grieve me, my boy, you grieve me. Both as a Sicilian and as the reasonable man I claim to be ... What I unworthily represent, of course, has nothing to do with it... But both the Sicilian I am and the reasonable man I claim to be rebel against this injustice to Sicily, this insult to reason ... And mind you, I have always spelt the word reason with a small "r" ... Is it really possible 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 Sicily, but the entire United States of America? With a head here in Sicily interviewed by reporters and then, poor fellow, vilified by the press in the blackest terms? ... D'you know him? I do. A good man, an exemplary father, an untiring worker. He's got rich, certainly he has, but by his own efforts. And he, too, had his troubles with Mori ... Certain men inspire respect: for their qualities, their savoir-faire, their frankness, their flair for cordial relations, for friendship. Then what you call public opinion, the wind of calumny, gets up at once and says: "These are the heads of the mafia." Now here's something you don't know: these men, the men whom public opinion calls the heads of the mafia, have one quality in common, a quality I would like to find in every man, one which is enough to redeem anyone in the eyes of God - a sense of justice ... naturally, instinctively ... And it's this sense of justice which makes them inspire respect...'

'That's just the point. The administration of justice is the prerogative of the State; one cannot allow ...'

'I am speaking of the sense of justice, not the administration of justice ... Anyway, suppose we two were squabbling about a piece of land, a will, or a debt; and along comes a third party and settles things between us; then in a sense that third party is administering justice. But you know what might have happened if we had continued litigation before
your
justice, don't you? Years would have passed and finally maybe, from impatience or anger, one or both of us might have resorted to violence ... In short, I don't consider that a man of peace, a peacemaker, is usurping the administration of justice which, of course, is the legitimate prerogative of the State ... '