Honoured Society Read Free Page B

in my pocket. He never said a word.’
    ‘But didn’t he realise what was happening all the time?’
    ‘Of course he did. Nothing ever got past him. Don Calò knew everything that was going on. He just wanted it that way. He never gave me any wages, so I cheated him and he pretended not to notice it. That was the way he wanted it.’

2
    T HE WORD MAFIA probably derives from the identical word in Arabic and means ‘place of refuge’. As such, it no doubt recalls the predicament of the relatively civilised Saracens after the conquest of Sicily by the Normans in the eleventh century. The Arabs had introduced smallholdings and scientific irrigation. Their rule by comparison with anything the island had known before (or since) was mild and beneficent. Had they remained, there is no reason why the prosperity and civilisation of Sicily should not have equalled that of Spain, but the Normans dislodged them and plunged the country back into the polar night of feudalism. Most of the Arab smallholders became serfs on the reconstituted estates. Some escaped to ‘the Mafia’.
    These are the dry bones of probability as unearthed by the historians. But scratch below the surface and the evidence of an even earlier origin comes to light. One discovers archaic – even Bronze Age – ingredients in the seemingly down-to-earth, devil-take-the-hindmost materialism of the men of the ‘Honoured Society’. In times of crisis, men like Don Calogero Vizzini tend sometimes to behave not so much like big-scale black-market operators of the twentieth century as like the personae of a Greek tragedy, whose motives are often so remote from our own as to be incomprehensible. This – from our viewpoint – irrational element in Mafia behaviour comes out strongly in the great feud between the Barbaccia and Lorello families of Godrano, near Palermo.
    The two families quarrelled back in 1918 over the possession of a wood. This in itself is perhaps significant, because the wood, standing unaccountably intact in a country denuded of trees since Roman times, may have survived through its supposed possession of sacred or magic attributes. The dispute over this ragged patch of stunted oaks and thorny underbrush cost these two families dozens of lives, until, it is supposed,Don Calò Vizzini – that great advocate of Mafia unity – intervened in 1942 to help repair the quarrel. Following age-old custom, the thing now would have been to arrange a marriage between two suitable members of the opposing families. This could not be done through lack of mutually acceptable candidates, and in 1944 the war flared up again with the commission by the Lorellos of what to the men of honour is considered the most odious of all crimes: Francisco Barbaccia, head of his family, was kidnapped and never seen again. It is at this point that the archaic component of the Mafia mentality – its utter separation from the outlook of the ordinary criminal of modern times – is apparent. The killing of Barbaccia was bad enough, but the final offence – held to be ten times more execrable than the killing itself – was the concealment of the body so that vengeance could not be ritually sworn ‘in the presence of the corpse’. By 1960, nearly one-tenth of the population of Godrano had become casualties as the feud developed and spread, the latest victim – in the absence of eligible adults – being a boy of twelve.
    The Mafia stands outside Christian morality, but the uncorrupted form of the Mafia found in feudal Sicily has an iron morality of its own. No mafioso sees himself as a criminal, and the Mafia has always been the enemy of petty crime – and therefore, to a limited extent, the ally of the police, both in Sicily and the United States. The organisation demands blind obedience from its members, but will defend them in return through thick and thin – and in an alien land even extends its powerful protection to all immigrants of Sicilian birth. It can be regarded as a