Thomas Jones: How to Choose Your Friends

Thomas Jones

It’s 6.30 in the morning and a bus full of passengers is idling in a town square. All is quiet in the January dawn except for the rumbling engine and the cry of a street vendor selling panelle (chickpea fritters). As the bus pulls away, the conductor spots a man in a dark suit running across the square and calls for the driver to wait. The man is about to jump onto the running board when two shots are fired. He drops his briefcase and collapses on top of it. The driver stops the bus and goes to get the carabinieri, who gather around the corpse. The passengers shuffle off the bus and melt away down the streets and alleyways leading off the square. The panellaro has disappeared too, though he’s soon found: every day, after the bus has left, he moves on to his next patch, outside the school. He tells the carabinieri that he has a permit. The sergeant doesn’t care about that; he just wants to know who fired the shots. If the vendor tells him, he can get back to selling his fritters. ‘Why,’ the panellaro asks. ‘Have they shot someone?’

The opening scene of Leonardo Sciascia’s first novel, Il giorno della civetta (The Day of the Owl), published in 1961 and translated into English soon afterwards by Archibald Colquhoun and Arthur Oliver, is a masterpiece of irony and concision. The same can be said of the rest of the novel and the thirty books that followed over the next 28 years – most of them not much longer than a hundred pages – until Sciascia’s death in 1989. The back cover of the current Italian paperback of The Day of the Owl calls it ‘the first and greatest novel about the mafia’. It also includes, as an appendix, a foreword written by Sciascia in 1972, when the book was included on school reading lists, in which he sets out what he understands the mafia to be, taking issue not only with those who claim it doesn’t exist, but also with those who reduce it to a criminal organisation or a form of shadow state:

The mafia … is a system that in Sicily contains and moves the economic and power interests of a class that we can approximately call bourgeois; and it doesn’t arise and develop in the absence of the state (that is, when the state, with its laws and functions, is weak or missing) but inside the state. The mafia, in other words, is nothing other than a parasitic bourgeoisie, a bourgeoisie that doesn’t produce but only exploits.

The Day of the Owl is really only an example of this definition. That is, I wrote it with this intention. But perhaps it is also a good story.

It is a very good story.

One source for the title is revealed in an epigraph, taken from Henry VI Part III: ‘Come la civetta quando di giorno compare’ (‘Like the owl by day’). It sounds like a portent, a symbol of wisdom bringing dark truths to light, but the Shakespearean context piles on the irony. Halfway through Act V, the Duke of Somerset tries to rally the losing Lancastrian troops at the Battle of Tewkesbury:

And he, that will not fight for such a hopeGo home to bed, and, like the owl by day,If he arise, be mock’d and wonder’d at.

The owl here is not a symbol of wisdom or truth but an object of ridicule and an image of cowardice. The ‘hope’, meanwhile, is that Edward of Lancaster, the 17-year-old Prince of Wales, will live long and ‘renew’ the ‘glories’ of his grandfather Henry V. Instead, barely forty lines later, the boy is captured by the Yorkist faction, mocked and wondered at – ‘Can so young a thorn begin to prick?’ – and stabbed to death, while Somerset is hauled off for execution. Any reader of Sciascia’s novel hoping that truth will out and justice be served is going to be disappointed.

The panellaro’s response to the sergeant’s question contains – or conceals – an answer, which he, like everyone else, already knows. Colquhoun and Oliver translate his reply – ‘Hanno sparato?’ – as ‘Has there been shooting?’ because in Italian the third-person plural can be used for impersonal verbs (‘hanno bussato,’ literally ‘they knocked,’ is a way of saying ‘there was a knock at the door’). But the subject that seems to have disappeared from the panellaro’s reply is still lurking inside the verb. Who shot the man? They did. And everyone knows who they are, though anyone who knows what’s good for them isn’t going to talk. ‘What is the mafia?’ an anonymous character asks, rhetorically, later in the novel. ‘Just another rumour … Certain men inspire respect … Don Mariano is revered and respected by the whole town, is a bosom friend of mine and – believe me, I know how to choose my friends.’

The problem for Don Mariano’s friends, as one of them lays it out towards the end of the book, is that ‘the carabinieri have three links of a chain in their hands.’ And if they follow the chain to its end, it will lead all the way to members of parliament and government ministers in Rome. The first link is the triggerman, Diego Marchica, who would have got clean away if he hadn’t been recognised by a tree-pruner on his way to work. The tree-pruner never comes home – a few days later he turns up dead in a ditch – but he’d already told his wife the shooter’s nickname. The second link in the chain, the identity of the man who hired the shooter, is provided by a police informant. Wrong-footed by the new carabinieri captain’s ‘gentle manner’, the informant gives up a name that, as soon as it’s out of his mouth, he knows will be the death of him. Captain Bellodi doesn’t ask directly who arranged the murder: instead, he simply wants to know who might have approached the victim, a building contractor, with a protection offer. The informant gives him two names, but only one, Saro Pizzuco, is a member of the clan or cosca – the word literally means the head of an artichoke, with its densely clustered bracts – that has ‘certain if unprovable connections with public works’ (the other local cosca focuses on cigarette smuggling). The third link in the chain, Don Mariano Arena, is also provided by the informant: the name is too forbidding to be said out loud but he writes it down in a letter, which he posts shortly before being shot twice on his doorstep.

Caroline Moorehead, in her new biography of Sciascia, describes Captain Bellodi as ‘Sciascia’s model citizen, committed to democracy and power based on legality’, but nothing in Sciascia’s writing is that clear-cut. Bellodi, an outsider from northern Italy, has all three men arrested even though he doesn’t have enough evidence to charge them. To wring confessions out of Marchica and Pizzuco, he rigs a version of the prisoner’s dilemma. Marchica watches as Pizzuco appears to give a full confession though he cannot hear what is being said. The supposed transcript – in fact a ‘masterly piece of forgery’ by the carabinieri – is then read aloud to Marchica, who spills his own version of the beans. The police go back to Pizzuco with Marchica’s story, and he confesses for real, giving an account that’s ‘oddly like the forged statement that had made Marchica confess’.

It’s an ingenious device, on the part of the novelist as well as the police, and makes a novelistic point about different kinds of truth-telling. But it isn’t strictly legal, and shows that Bellodi is willing to bend the rules. Neither arrestee tells the entire truth, and each goes out of his way to heap blame on the other, whether motivated more by vengeance (Marchica) or self-preservation (Pizzuco). As it happens, Bellodi is on the right track, but there’s never any guarantee – quite the opposite, in fact – that a confession obtained by force or trickery is going to be true.

The image of a chain of suspects returns in Sciascia’s La scomparsa di Majorana (‘Majorana’s Disappearance’), a piece of non-fiction published in 1975. It’s an investigation into the suspected suicide of the Sicilian physicist Ettore Majorana. The 31-year-old prodigy – Fermi declared him the equal of Galileo or Newton – was last seen in Palermo on 25 or 26 March 1938, apparently intending to return by boat to Naples, where he had recently been appointed to a university chair. Sciascia reckons that he didn’t kill himself but withdrew to a monastery. But whatever the manner of his disappearance, Majorana’s purpose, Sciascia speculates, was to remove himself from the pursuit of atomic physics, since he foresaw its inevitable conclusion in the manufacture and deployment of weapons of mass destruction. Sciascia is thinking here with the logic of a novelist rather than a journalist or historian – with an appeal to character rather than an argument from evidence – as he also is when he suggests that Majorana’s proleptic horror at the coming destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is connected to a crime committed in Catania fourteen years earlier.

In the summer of 1924, a baby died in a house fire and traces of an accelerant were found at the scene. A teenage maid confessed to starting the blaze because she wanted to go back to work for her previous employer, who had been nicer to her than the baby’s parents were. This seemed an inadequate motive to the police – even if the maid started the fire, they reasoned, someone else must have incited her to do it – and suspicion fell on the dead infant’s aunts, anxious about losing their inheritance now that their brother had had a child. For years, blame passed down a ‘long chain’ of suspicion, accusation and counter-accusation: the maid, her brother, her mother, her sister’s boyfriend, the baby’s aunts and their husbands, who also happened to be not only brothers but Ettore Majorana’s uncles. One uncle, Dante Majorana, spent three years in jail before the maid alone was found guilty. Sciascia is scathing about the ‘absurdity’ of the convolutions woven by the police around the ‘pitiable grain of truth’.

Yet this is the opposite of what happens in many of Sciascia’s novels, where any attempt to reveal the intricacies of a mafia plot invariably collapses in favour of a simpler but false explanation. ‘We must pull the first ring out of the wall,’ Don Mariano’s friend says in The Day of the Owl. Back home in Parma on sick leave at the end of the novel, Captain Bellodi reads in a newspaper that the murders he had solved are now suspected to have been crimes of passion. Perhaps the difference is that Dante Majorana didn’t know how to choose his friends.

Leonardo Sciascia was born in Racalmuto, a small town in the province of Agrigento in south-western Sicily, on 8 January 1921. His grandfather worked in the sulphur mines. He had started underground at the age of nine but ‘worked his way to the surface’, Moorehead writes, ‘with the help of a priest who taught him to read and do sums’. Sciascia’s father, Pasquale, emigrated to the US in 1912 but returned after seven years, took a job at the mine office and married Genoveffa Martorelli, whose family owned a small tile factory in Racalmuto. Leonardo was born nine months later. They lived with Pasquale’s father, brother, three sisters and brother-in-law in a house above the brother’s tailoring shop, where Sciascia and his younger siblings were brought up by his aunts as much as by his parents.

He wasn’t yet two when Mussolini seized power in October 1922. His father joined the Fascist Party, if only out of expediency, but his aunt Maria Concetta kept a picture of the murdered Socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti in her sewing basket, and their maid, Totina, told young Leonardo that Mussolini’s actual name was ‘musso-di-porco’ (‘pig’s snout’ in a kind of Italianised Sicilian, but more offensive than the English translation suggests).

When Mussolini went to Palermo in May 1924 he met with more open disrespect. On arriving at the small town of Piana dei Greci (now Piana degli Albanesi) with a large entourage, he was met by the local mafia boss, Francesco Cuccia, who had become mayor by defeating the Socialists not at the ballot box but through intimidation and violence. ‘Your excellency is with me,’ Cuccia said, ‘and under my protection. Why do you need all these cops?’ Two days later, in Agrigento, Mussolini declared war on the mafia. Cesare Mori, prefect of Bologna, was sent to Sicily and appointed prefect of Palermo, with extraordinary powers and jurisdiction over the whole island. Thousands of men were rounded up and imprisoned, including Cuccia and 53 of his associates. As a character puts it in To Each His Own (1966), ‘forty years ago a big mafia tried to squash the little one.’

There’s a moment in The Day of the Owl when Captain Bellodi thinks, in a flash of anger, that ‘with a few months’ suspension in Sicily of constitutional guarantees, the evil could be uprooted for ever.’ Then he remembers the repression under Mori – an outsider from the north, like himself – and checks himself, but persists in thinking that Sicily was the only region in Italy to have been given a kind of freedom under Fascism. ‘His judgment was still not clear,’ the narrator says. And Sciascia had known since boyhood, through the example of his family, that there didn’t have to be a binary choice between Fascism and the mafia: his grandfather died at Christmas 1928, ‘an unrepentant anti-mafia and anti-Fascist to the last’, though his daughters, Sciascia’s aunts, called him a cretino for his excessive honesty. By then Leonardo was at school, one of the few children whose family could afford to buy him shoes. There was no school building so lessons were held in various places around town, including the carabinieri barracks. From their classroom they could hear prisoners being tortured in the cells. At weekends the children would go to the cinema to watch Charlie Chaplin movies.

In 1935 Sciascia’s father got a job at another mine and the family moved to Caltanissetta, a provincial capital four times the size of Racalmuto, where Sciascia started secondary school. There was a bookshop where left-wing intellectuals gathered in semi-secret, including two of Sciascia’s teachers, and after a while he and his friends joined them. They weren’t as horrified as they should have been – or would have been, if they’d known the full extent of the atrocities – by the conquest of Ethiopia, but Sciascia was in no doubt as to which side he supported in the Spanish Civil War, and it wasn’t the side that Mussolini sent thousands of ‘volunteers’ to fight on. After Italy entered the Second World War, Sciascia was conscripted but failed his medical the first two times. The third time he was found fit for a desk job, but never given one. Instead he was employed by the state to requisition wheat from Sicilian farmers, which showed him a side of rural life, and rural poverty, that he hadn’t previously seen.

By the time the Allies landed in Sicily on 10 July 1943, the island was ‘on the edge of starvation’. The last of the retreating Italian and German troops crossed the Strait of Messina on 17 August, but the south had fallen more quickly. Sciascia was back in Racalmuto – Caltanissetta had been heavily bombed – when the first US soldiers walked up the street distributing cigarettes. There was wine and dancing and an American flag. Disillusion soon set in, however, as the occupying forces failed to provide the relief – and the food – that people needed. The resurgent mafia thrived. For one thing, someone had to run the black market. For another, the Allied military government was looking around for suitable candidates to replace Fascist local administrators – part of the process of defascistizzazione – and few had better credentials than those who’d been purged by Mori, especially if they also happened to be anti-communist. ‘Half the towns on the island,’ Moorehead writes, ‘soon had men in place with close ties to the mafia.’

The Allies took the war to the mainland in September 1943, but the bloodshed in Sicily persisted after the liberation of Italy on 25 April 1945. There was a violent separatist movement, which Sciascia deplored: ‘In separatism was everything I most hated … Fascism, the landed right-wing, Sicilianismo, the obsession with the worst side of Sicily.’ The separatists were especially opposed to the land reform policy of Fausto Gullo, the Socialist agriculture minister in the provisional government formed in April 1944. Gullo decreed that uncultivated land be taken away from large property owners and redistributed among landless contadini (peasant farmers). Landlords ignored the decree and contadini were driven off their new land with murderous violence. In September 1944, a Communist Party meeting in Villalba was attacked by the local mafia with guns and grenades. In 1947, at Portella della Ginestra, hundreds of people gathered for a May Day rally to agitate for land reform and celebrate the victory of the Communist-Socialist coalition in the recent regional elections. They were attacked by an armed gang led by Salvatore Giuliano, a separatist bandit with links to the mafia. Eleven people were killed at the scene, including four children, and many more wounded, some of whom later died from their injuries. Giuliano himself was murdered three years later by his cousin and associate Gaspare Pisciotta, who told a court in Lazio that ‘we were a single body, bandits, police and mafia, like the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.’

Sciascia’s younger brother, Giuseppe (Peppino), died in 1948. He had been working with their father at a sulphur mine in Assoro, fifty kilometres north-east of Caltanissetta (‘a desolate, ugly, horrible landscape’, as Sciascia later described it), but the workers were on extended strike. At around 7 a.m. on the morning of 5 May, his father knocked on Peppino’s bedroom door to ask him what he’d like for breakfast. Eggs, he said. Shortly afterwards he shot himself. He was 25.

Their father blamed himself, according to Sciascia, for not sending Peppino home during the strike. Their mother ‘became almost entirely reclusive’, Moorehead writes. She returned to live in Racalmuto, where her son was buried. Her other son was living there too, with his wife, Maria, a schoolteacher, and two daughters. Three weeks after Peppino’s death, Sciascia qualified as a teacher himself, and the following year started work at his old primary school. He ‘was not the most conscientious of teachers’, Moorehead says, and ‘increasingly … felt alienated from his job’. The man who ran the bookshop in Caltanissetta offered him a side gig as a magazine editor. The first issue of Galleria included a piece by Sciascia on the arrival of US troops in Racalmuto in 1943 and a previously unpublished story by Luigi Pirandello (then Sicily’s only Nobel laureate). Pirandello, who had died in 1936, was an important influence on Sciascia. He published an essay on ‘Pirandello and Pirandellismo’ in 1953 and spoke about him at a conference in Palermo where he met Italo Calvino and Pier Paolo Pasolini, both of whom became friends and collaborators.

In 1954 Sciascia wrote a piece based on his experiences as a teacher and sent it to Calvino, who passed it on to Alberto Moravia, who published it in his magazine Nuovi Argomenti under the title ‘School Chronicles’: ‘Here, in a remote Sicilian town, I enter the classroom with the spirit of a sulphur miner descending into the dark tunnels.’ A publisher read it and encouraged Sciascia to expand it into a book. Le parrocchie di Regalpetra, a fictionalised portrait of Racalmuto (translated by Judith Green in 1969 not as ‘The Parishes of Regalpetra’ but as Salt in the Wound, the title Sciascia had wanted for the Italian version), appeared in 1956 and sold well enough for him to buy his aunts a fridge. The same year, he wrote a piece for Pasolini’s magazine Officina on what he called ‘sixth-day poetry’. The ‘sixth-day heroes’ of 1848 were those men in Milan who ‘left their houses armed and cockaded once the storm of the Five Days had passed’; Sciascia’s ‘sixth-day poets’ were those who celebrated the anti-Fascist Resistance only after the war was over. ‘We had poetry on the Resistance but not of the Resistance.’ Most Italians, he wrote, looked forward only to peace, an end to rationing and bombardment. Many still thought that ‘if Mussolini had stopped after the conquest of Ethiopia, we’d have been all right.’

For the 1957-58 school year Sciascia was seconded to the education ministry in Rome. While there he worked on a set of stories that were published as Sicilian Uncles. In ‘The American Aunt’, a woman who had emigrated to the US several years earlier returns home for a visit – and everyone is disappointed. In ‘The Death of Stalin’, a shoemaker in a Sicilian village dreams of discussing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with the Soviet leader. The other two stories are set in the Risorgimento and during the Spanish Civil War. When he returned to Sicily in the autumn of 1958, Sciascia wrote to Calvino that he was working on something ‘perhaps excessively modern’, in the form of a crime novel or giallo. He had been reading Maigret, Father Brown, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe stories, and corresponding with his friend Renato Candida, a carabinieri officer in Agrigento whose own book, This Mafia, Sciascia had helped to get published in 1956. Candida was the model not only for Captain Bellodi but, Sciascia wrote in 1988, after his friend’s death and close to his own, ‘for all my stories in which there is the character of an investigator’.

That isn’t quite true, of course. The hero of Sciascia’s second giallo, To Each His Own, isn’t a police officer but, more like his creator, a schoolteacher and occasional literary journalist. Sciascia was disappointed, Moorehead writes, that The Day of the Owl ‘had not served any “real social or political” purpose’. Some critics suggested that the novel’s portrayal of the mafia as both invulnerable and all-pervasive may have done more to help than hinder it. Others insisted that the mere idea of the mafia was a left-wing fever dream. But someone sent Sciascia an anonymous message saying that if he wasn’t happy in Sicily ‘we can send him somewhere he’ll feel much better off.’ According to Moorehead, ‘he refused to take it seriously.’ Why would the mafia bother doing away with a writer? But To Each His Own questions the wisdom both of ignoring an anonymous threat and of thinking that your insignificance makes you immune.

The novel opens with a pharmacist receiving an anonymous letter: ‘This letter is your death sentence, you’ll die for what you did.’ Everyone agrees it must be a joke, though the pharmacist doesn’t find it very funny, and a few weeks later he’s shot dead while out hunting. His friend, a doctor, is shot too. Everyone agrees it wasn’t a joke after all: the pharmacist must have been having an affair, and suspicion falls on a young woman who has been seen making frequent visits to the pharmacy. She explains that she was picking up medicine for her younger brother, which persuades the police but not public opinion. Everyone remains convinced that the pharmacist was murdered for having sex with someone he shouldn’t have.

Everyone, that is, except Paolo Laurana. Approaching forty, he lives with his mother and commutes to the provincial capital by bus every day to teach Italian and Latin at the liceo classico. During the summer holidays – the pharmacist and doctor are murdered towards the end of August – Laurana works on his literary criticism, which is published in magazines that no one in the town reads (between his first two novels Sciascia had written two historical investigations: The Council of Egypt, about the 18th-century forger Giuseppe Vella, and Death of an Inquisitor, about a murder by a heretical Sicilian friar in 17th-century Palermo).

While the anonymous letter is being inspected, Laurana notices that the words have been cut out of the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano. Through the back of the note he can read part of the paper’s motto, ‘unicuique suum’ (‘to each his own’). Out of naive curiosity, though the novel calls it ‘vanity’, he begins his own investigation. What if the doctor not the pharmacist was the real target, and the anonymous note a way to throw people off the scent? It’s simple enough to find out from the newsagent or the postman who in town takes L’Osservatore Romano. Before long Laurana is poking his nose into places he shouldn’t, though he seems oblivious to the risks he’s taking.

Although he is clever in many ways, Laurana doesn’t have much insight into the reasons people behave as they do, himself included. He disapproves of the way men leer at the doctor’s widow, though he isn’t immune from leering at her himself, and neither is the novel: Sciascia tends to depict his women with less subtlety than his male characters, and at times they veer close to stereotypes – the scheming harridan, the siren luring hapless men to their doom – while the hapless men are described with more sympathy and irony. When it becomes clear that the murders have a motive that is both sexual and connected to organised crime (an advance on the either/or of The Day of the Owl), Laurana asks a cynical parish priest for the names of local mafiosi, though he doesn’t put it quite so bluntly, instead asking about ‘un notabile che corrompe, che intrallazza, che ruba’: ‘someone notable who corrupts, who schemes, who steals’. Even unborn babies know the answer, the priest replies – though it comes as a surprise to Laurana. He persists in sharing his suspicions and discoveries with people he clearly shouldn’t trust. The novel ends with two characters discussing the case. It turns out they already knew the story that Laurana has so painstakingly unearthed, but were wise enough to keep it to themselves. In the last line one of them calls the schoolteacher a cretino. A damning verdict, until you remember it was also what Sciascia’s aunts called his grandfather.

The atmosphere in Laurana’s town is stifling, claustrophobic, apparently reflecting the way Sciascia felt about Caltanissetta. Nothing was keeping him and Maria there – both their daughters had finished school – and in 1967 they moved to Palermo. One of his new friends in the city was the journalist Mauro de Mauro, who interviewed him for the left-wing daily L’Ora. De Mauro disappeared in September 1970, soon after telling Sciascia he was working on a big story. It might have had to do with the death of Enrico Mattei, the chairman of the state oil company whose plane blew up in 1962, or with drug traffic between Sicily and the US, or with a failed right-wing coup. ‘De Mauro said the right thing to the wrong man,’ Sciascia wrote, ‘and the wrong thing to the right man.’ His body was never found.

Some years ago , at a child’s birthday party at Lake Bolsena, one of the other parents, a recently retired engineer, told me a story about his time working in Libya. One evening he was taking a walk along the beach when a group of men approached him and asked if he was Italian. He was surprised by the question but said yes. The men seemed pleased with the answer and pointed to the lights of the oil refinery along the coast. ‘Palermo?’ they asked. ‘No,’ the engineer had to tell them. ‘You’re still in Libya.’ At the time I thought it was like something out of Conrad, but only because I hadn’t yet read Sciascia’s short story collection The Wine Dark Sea (1973). In ‘The Long Crossing’, a group of men sell everything they have or borrow more than they can ever repay to raise the 250,000 lire that a man with a boat is charging to take them to America. Reaching land after eleven nights at sea, they are at first surprised by how similar ‘Nugiorsi’ is to Sicily, and then realise the awful truth.

‘The Long Crossing’ is a fable about the difficulty of leaving the old world behind, but it’s also a realist account of a people smuggler exploiting a restrictive border regime and the vulnerable people trying to circumvent it. In the early 1950s, nearly half a million people emigrated from Sicily, including several of Sciascia’s pupils. By the time The Wine Dark Sea was published twenty years later, Italy was pivoting from being a country that people left to one that people were trying to come to. The characters may have changed but the story is the same.

When La scomparsa di Majorana was published, there was consternation at Sciascia’s suggestion that ‘in a more human, more attentive and more just world’, Werner Heisenberg – who stayed in Germany and didn’t build a nuclear bomb – would be more celebrated than his contemporaries who went to America and did. Robert Oppenheimer, Sciascia argues, ‘left Los Alamos a broken man, like a “collaborationist” prisoner in one of Hitler’s extermination camps’. This wasn’t knee-jerk anti-Americanism; Sciascia could also be scathing of Stalinist Cold Warriors in the PCI. In his 1961 short story ‘Demotion’, a man comes home to an empty house. He eventually finds his wife at the local church with many of the other townswomen, staging a sit-in to prevent the removal of a statue of St Philomena, whose feast day the Vatican has ordered to be struck from liturgical calendars. The man tricks his wife into leaving the protest by telling her that her mother has had a stroke – a lie at least as cruel as any that the Catholic Church tells her. ‘If the priest tells you that people who don’t vote for the Christian Democrats go to Hell, you believe him,’ he says to her once they get home. ‘If he tells you that St Philomena doesn’t exist, you revolt!’ She tells him he understands nothing. While he’s waiting for her to cook his cabbage and boiled eggs, he reads in L’Unità about the detonation in Novaya Zemlya of the largest nuclear weapon ever tested. ‘Now they know that our bomb is more powerful than theirs,’ he tells himself with satisfaction. But then he reads that Stalin’s corpse is to be removed from Lenin’s tomb and he throws his newspaper in the air.

In June 1975, Sciascia won a seat on Palermo city council as a PCI candidate but he quit both the party and the council two years later in protest at the ‘historic compromise’ with the Christian Democrats. His contempt for the latter was unwavering. A few years earlier, Moorehead writes, the Sciascias had been on holiday to Zafferana Etnea, in the east of Sicily, under the volcano. A group of senior Christian Democrats were staying at the same hotel ‘and in the evenings Sciascia watched them as they walked around the courtyard, saying their rosaries. It reminded him of Dante’s circle for thieves.’ Todo modo (1974, translated as One Way or Another) is set at a religious retreat for senior figures from the worlds of politics and business. The first-person narrator is an artist who turns up looking for solitude and becomes embroiled in the intrigue and violence that ensue. It was the last book that Pasolini reviewed, for Tempo in January 1975. (He and Sciascia had been in Zafferana Etnea together in 1968 for the inaugural Brancati Prize, awarded to Elsa Morante.) Pasolini described Todo modo as a ‘metaphysical thriller’, one of Sciascia’s best books and a ‘subtle metaphor for the last thirty years of Christian Democrat, Fascist and mafioso power’. Ten months later Pasolini was killed – beaten, burned, repeatedly run over – at a beach in Ostia. A teenage sex worker admitted to the murder but later retracted his confession, saying it had been coerced, instead blaming three unknown men with Sicilian accents. The crime, like De Mauro’s disappearance, remains unsolved.

At a posthumous screening of Pasolini’s last film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, before it was banned, Sciascia sat in the corner smoking and reading an Agatha Christie novel. ‘One should never make such despairing films,’ he said afterwards. He spent the summer of 1977 in the countryside near Racalmuto writing what may be his least despairing book. Moorehead says it is ‘the only one of Sciascia’s books to have a happy ending’, even if that happy ending involves abandoning Sicily for good. Candido, a homage to Voltaire, tells the story of Candido Munafò, born on the night the Allies landed. As his name suggests, he can’t help telling the truth. This puts him in conflict with both the Catholic Church and the Communist Party, which expels him, so he goes to Paris with the woman he loves. The reviewers were not kind.

On 16 March 1978, the leading Christian Democrat and former prime minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped by the Red Brigades. They seized him and killed his five bodyguards as he was on his way to parliament for a vote of confidence in the new minority government led by his colleague Giulio Andreotti. The political class united in the face of terrorist extremism and Andreotti’s mandate was overwhelmingly approved by Christian Democrats, Communists and Socialists, sealing the historic compromise – for which Moro had done much of the work – as a parliamentary fact. The Red Brigades held Moro captive for 54 days, demanding the release of their jailed comrades. The government refused to make a deal. Moro’s corpse was found in the boot of a car, halfway between the Christian Democrat and Communist Party headquarters, on 9 May.

Sciascia’s book The Moro Affair was published four months later. He accused the authorities of deliberately sacrificing Moro for their own unworthy political ends. Not only did they refuse to negotiate but they had ignored the messages concealed in Moro’s letters from captivity, which Sciascia scrutinises with some close (if not always persuasive) reading. Reactions to the book were ‘predictably harsh’. In 1979 he entered parliament as one of the Radical Party’s eighteen MPs and sat on the parliamentary commission of inquiry into Moro’s kidnapping, which delivered its findings in 1983. His minority report is included in later editions of The Moro Affair (he hadn’t changed his mind). He didn’t stand for re-election.

‘Twenty years ago,’ Sciascia told Le Monde in 1979, ‘I believed the world could change. Now I no longer do.’ In the 1980s the fight against organised crime and mafia retaliations intensified. New laws were passed and vast, complex investigations conducted as the bodies piled up. In February 1986 nearly five hundred people went on trial in Palermo for mafia-related activities. Sciascia and Moorehead both reported on the maxiprocesso, though she didn’t meet him. Many of the defendants were found guilty and, as Moorehead writes, ‘the mafia had been robbed of its aura of impunity and invincibility,’ though there was ‘still much to be done’. The lead prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, were both murdered in 1992. Sciascia was no longer alive by then. He was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in February 1989 and died at home in Palermo on 20 November. He was buried in Racalmuto.

A Sicilian Man is nicely written, well paced and thoroughly researched; top of the list of acknowledgments is Sciascia’s younger daughter, Anna Maria. Moorehead has however been ill served by her publisher. The book is riddled with minor errors, none of which matters much on its own, but they add up. Italian words are misspelled, dates don’t always match and Corleone isn’t ‘north of Palermo’. As for the subtitle, something along the plain lines of ‘A Life of Leonardo Sciascia’ might have been better than the sensationalist, unwieldy tricolon that lumbers towards that ponderous and troublesome word ‘soul’. Not only Italy’s soul but Sicily’s, too, comes up in the book, as well as its ‘essence’. The importance of Sicily to Sciascia’s writing can’t be overstated, but Calvino perhaps put it best when he said that Sciascia was a ‘local author, rooted, who had made the universal out of those roots’. Sicily and Italy don’t have a monopoly on racketeering; the dynamics of corruption that Sciascia dramatises in his novels are in many respects the same in Westminster or Washington as in Palermo.

A Simple Story was published the day Sciascia died. It’s short even by his standards – 66 generously spaced pages – and the title is both ironic and not. A man is murdered for stumbling into the middle of a mafia operation, more people die (some innocent, some not so innocent) and no one is held accountable. The word ‘mafia’ never appears in the text; it would be superfluous, and A Simple Story contains no superfluous words. Its absence hangs in the air, though, like the strange chemical smell in the outbuildings of the house where the corpse was discovered, and never more strongly than during a brief exchange between a priest and a police officer. Before discussing the murder, they make sure they understand each other, in a formal exchange of compliments that says almost nothing but conveys everything that they or we need to know. ‘You are one of the few priests who still dress as priests,’ the commissario says (earlier he had claimed he couldn’t smell anything in the outbuildings; the priest doesn’t always dress as a priest). ‘I don’t quite know why, but it’s a fact that I find heartening.’ ‘I am an old-fashioned priest,’ the priest replies, ‘and you are an old-fashioned Catholic. Good, dare I say, for us.’

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