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liberty, but nobody knows what to do with it. And in any case there is no time to learn, for the Army, with its firing squads, is on the way. Quietly and sadly, arms folded, they sit waiting behind closed doors.
    In those days the Mafia was still with the people; then, gradually, as it gathered its power it began to draw apart. The Mafia was paid for its part in Garibaldi’s triumph, it organised the plebiscite (at Lampedusa’s Donnafugata – Voters, 515; Voting, 512; Yes, 512; No, zero); its chieftains, like his illiterate Sedaras, married their daughters to penniless princes. From that time on the Mafia began to elbow the feudal aristocracy aside. By 1945 the process was complete. Don Calogero Vizzini was the feudal overlord of all Sicily as well as head of the Mafia. And thereby he had become the worst single thorn in the peasants’ side since the bad old days of the Bourbons.
    Don Fabrizio, the ruminative and unworldly princeling of Lampedusa’s novel, philosophical in his acceptance of Garibaldi and the Mafia, felt queasy at the first sight of the infant democracy newly delivered at Donnafugata. ‘Something had died, God only knew in what back-alley, in what corner of the popular conscience.’ People always had done, and always would do, what they were told, and he found it in some way demeaning that anyone should find it necessary to construct this elaborate edifice of pretence dedicated to the lie that free will and freedom of choice actually existed.
    However sickening to Don Fabrizio’s stomach the newly imported democracy might have been, for the Mafia it was an invention as promising as the new steam-engine. In the old days the Viceroy had given the orders – at most, and as a matter of courtesy, taking the advice of his council of nobles. Now it was to be the turn of anyone who could fight his way to the controls of this wonderful new machine. In 1881 communal elections were held at Villalba – the town that was to become Don Calogero Vizzini’s capital – and the Marchese of Villalba, supported by the Mafia, took his precautions ten days in advance. The two hundred and fourteen citizens possessing the qualifications entitling them to vote were locked up in a granary, from which they were released, eight at a time, and escorted by the Marchese’s armed guards to the polls. The Marchese was elected.
    Later the Mafia invented and perfected new methods of democratic suasion. By the time the government of Giolitti reached power, the Mafia had become the only electoral force that counted in Sicily and the Government was realistic in its acceptance of the fact. Alongi, who published a study of the Mafia in 1902, describes the arrangements for voting he had witnessed a year or two previously: ‘Some short distance from the polling station the road was barred by a group of sinister figures. Here each voter as he approached was seized, thoroughly bastinadoed, and forced to drink a huge glass of wine. There followed a thorough search of his person, after which the government candidate’s voting slip was put into his hand and he was led or dragged to the ballot box, where the president took the slip from him and put it in.’
    Later still, this physical suppression of the element of choice gradually came to be considered unnecessary; it was found that the same result could be obtained by making the voter understand what he stood to lose by voting for the wrong side. As it was never explained to the voter what programme the candidates stood for, and he was assumed to be quite ignorant of the function of Parliament, the contending parties might be represented by symbols such as the mule and the ox, and the agricultural voters warned that it was either a case of voting for the mule or looking elsewhere for work in future. The system recalls the last election heldunder French tutelage in parts of then colonial West Africa, where bloody disputes took place between villages over the relative merits in terms of