Honoured Society Read Online Free PDF Page A

under the Bourbons provided the only means for the poor and humble to make themselves respected … To the Mafia, then, went all the rebels, all those that had suffered injuries, all the victims.’
    It was in the school of the vendetta, too, that the traditional character of the mafioso was formed. The common man, a victim of absolute power, had to learn to stomach insult or injury with apparent indifference so that vengeance could be delayed until the opportunityfor its consummation presented itself. The mafioso therefore developed a kind of self-control closely resembling that quality known as giri by the Japanese, and so much admired by them. A true man of honour never weakened his position or armed his enemy in advance by outbursts of passion or of fear. When he sustained some grave injury he made a pact with himself to be revenged, and thereafter would wait patiently and unemotionally, half a lifetime if necessary, until his moment came – often seemingly on excellent terms with the man he proposed to destroy.
    But when a man lost his head, threw Mafia-inculcated secrecy and caution to the wind and struck back openly, his only chance of salvation was to take to the maquis . For this reason there was never a time when Sicily was without its bandits. At the end of the Second World War thirty separate armed bands terrorised western Sicily, while even in the late winter of 1962–3 motorised bandits were still staging highway robberies on the main provincial highway between Castellamare and Ballestrate. A hundred and fifty years ago the Bourbon authorities decided to deal with this situation by creating the first pseudo-police force. The only qualification for enrolment in the ‘Armed Companies’, as they were called, was ruthlessness. Many of these upholders of the law were ferocious criminals reprieved from the gallows and allowed to rehabilitate themselves in this way. What the familiars of the Inquisition had overlooked, the Armed Companies took. After the depredations carried out in the name of religion, Sicilians were now doomed to suffer voicelessly under the agents of the State. Since then they have quite simply turned their backs on authority of any kind. For this reason the police charged with the investigation of the highway robberies of February 1963 met with nothing but the most intractable hostility from local villagers, while even the victims of the robberies appear not to have been specially helpful. For this reason, when a man is found lying seriously wounded, possibly dying, and the police appeal to him to identify his aggressor, the reply is usually couched in a formula: ‘If I die, may God forgive me, as I forgive the one who did this. If I manage to pull through, I know how to settle my own accounts.’
    This is the famous Sicilian omertà – ‘manliness’, which rules thepublic conscience and is sustained so often even in the face of death. It is a word which calls for further examination, and is best understood by the study of an extreme case of omertà in action.
    Some four or five years ago one of two brothers living together in a Sicilian farmhouse disappeared. The men were known to have been on the worst possible terms for years, and the younger and stronger one frequently knocked his older brother about and even threatened to kill him. Finally the older brother vanished and the police got to hear about it, searched the farmhouse, and found inefficiently cleaned-up bloodstains on the floor. It is a popular misconception that a case for murder cannot be made out if no body can be found. In this case it was decided by the examining magistrate that a corpus delicti existed, constituted by the threats of murder known to have been made, the man’s disappearance, the bloodstains, and the suspect’s immediate assumption of his brother’s property. The younger brother was accordingly tried for murder, found guilty, and sentenced to imprisonment for life.
    A year or two later a carabiniere, who