Honoured Society Read Online Free PDF

knew the older brother, suddenly found himself face to face with the ‘murdered’ man. He was working quietly as a labourer on a farm in the mountains, only two miles away. It emerged that as part of his plan to be revenged on his brother, the man had changed his name, although most of his fellow labourers and some of the neighbours knew who he was all the same. This was omertà with a vengeance. It simply did not occur to these people to go to the police, despite the terrific injustice that had been done. It was ‘manly’ to solve one’s own problems in one’s own way and leave others to do the same, and one ‘lost respect’ by poking one’s nose into other people’s affairs.
    The Sicilian conscience is further bedevilled by an unfortunate linguistic confusion, arising out of the similarity between the words omertà and umiltà – humility, the Christian virtue so much extolled in the Church. Many illiterate Siciliane have combined the two words to produce a hybrid of mixed pagan and Christian significance. The virtuous man is in Mafia fashion ‘manly’ and silent, and as a Christian, humble.
    Far from protecting the underdog, the Mafia today has taken theplace of the oppressors of old, but it still benefits from a moral climate formed in past centuries. The Sicilian is a trifle cynical and quite self-sufficient . He fights his own battles, keeps his mouth shut, and has little interest in the doings of humanity outside the circle of his family, extended perhaps to include his second cousins. ‘Manliness’, once a barricade raised against injustice, now serves to keep justice out.
    * * *
    In the past it was the Mafia – the product of weak government that had developed its own vested interest in governmental weakness – that whipped up the frantic jacqueries of 1820, 1840 and 1866. The savageries of these outbursts of peasant hatred are quite inexplicable to anyone unaware of the long years of contempt that had preceded them. As in Spain, the targets of popular fury were always the same: the landlord, the Church, the police. There is no better description of the kind of thing that could happen than that given by Giovanni Verga in his story ‘Liberty’, which is largely factual and based on the rising at Brontë, put down by Nino Bixio, lieutenant of Garibaldi – the man who was to have given the land to the peasants.
    Like the sea in storm, the crowd foamed and swayed in front of the club of the gentry, and outside the Town Hall, and on the steps of the church – a sea of white stocking-caps, axes and sickles glittering. Then they burst into the little street.
    ‘Your turn first, baron! You who have had folks cudgelled by your estate guards!’ At the head of all the people a witch, with her old hair sticking up, armed with nothing but her nails. ‘Your turn, priest of the devil, for you’ve sucked the soul out of us!’ … ‘Your turn, police-sergeant , you who never took the law on anybody except poor folks who’d got nothing!’ ‘Your turn, estate guards, who sold your own flesh and your neighbour’s flesh for ten pence a day!’
    Now they were drunk with the killing. Sickles, hands, rags, stones, everything red with blood. The gentry! Kill them all! Kill them all! Down with the gentry!
    ‘Don’t kill me,’ pleads the priest, ‘I’m in mortal sin!’ Neighbour Lucia being the mortal sin; neighbour Lucia, whose father sold her to the priest when she was fourteen years old, at the time of the famine winter. But the priest is hacked to pieces on the cobblestones of the street. Then it is the turn of the apothecary, the lawyer, and the lawyer’s eleven-year-old son. The estate guards fire on the crowd from the castle, but the castle is stormed and the defenders massacred, the baron’s young sons trampled to death, the baroness and her baby thrown from her balcony to the street.
    And then suddenly the slaughter is over. They are free of the gentry and rage is dead. Now they have their