ABSTRACT: Leonardo Sciascia replies to the painter Renato Guttuso who, in an open letter (text no.4182) had declared his dismay for Sciascia's decision to run as a candidate on the Radical Party ticket. "Your worry and dismay do not come from having found me contradicting myself: they are one way, and your way of being a Communist and your way of understanding friendship". "And this is the true reason, deep and awful (yes, awful too) for you letter of last Saturday: that you feel you are in the right and see me, your friend, moving off in a different direction". "I have skimmed through quite a few inquisitorial trials, especially those of the 17th Century, and I assure you that from the greater part of them one gains the impression of an authentic, sincere, passionate desire of the inquisitors to save the souls of the those being tried".

(LA REPUBBLICA, May 8, 1979)

Dear Renato,

The fact that you want to remind me of things we said to each other a few weeks ago does not make me think you suspect me of wanting to go back on them. Rather, I think you have started to fear that Pannella's prodigiously evil influence has made me forget them. But I can assure you that I have not forgotten and would be able to repeat them.

The enocunter with Pannella and my accepting to be a candidate on the Radical ticket have not changed my ideas and my judgements in the least. When, immediately after my accepting the candidacy, I claimed the right to contradict myself, I meant to indicate a contradiction that regarded my "physical person", to say it in the language of the tax laws. Not my ideals, not my thoughts, not my judgements.

I am contradicting myself only in the fact that immediately after deciding not to accept any candidacy, I suddenly accepted one on the Radical ticket. For the rest, I know that I am not contradicting myself.

To all those imbeciles who, having seized on the word contradiction and now point it against me, I can only suggest that they read or re-read everything I have written from 1950 until today. I can make no such suggestion to you who have always been my attentive and highly intelligent reader, the lucid and cordial judge of even those things from which you most dissented. You know very well that I am not contradicting myself even now. Your worry and dismay do not come from having found me contradicting myself: they are one way, and your way of being a Communist and your way of understanding friendship. You say: "The news of your candidacy in the Radical Party has made me reflect on the degree and quality of my friendship for you". On the contrary, your being a Communist in the era of Sociaist realism, during the Vittorini-Togiatti polemic, in the face of the Hungarian and Czechoslovakian events, in these years of historic compromise, has not made me reflect on the friendship I felt for you even before me

eting you and which was then confirmed when I got to know you.

My oldest and dearest friend, a friendship which began at school 45 years ago and has endured unchanged, was a Christian Democrat for at least twenty years. Between us there has always been serene reasoning about his illusions and delusions, about my illusions and delusions. At a certain point he ceased to be a Christian Democrat, but because in that party he had consumated his experience and exhausted his illusions. It was the point where, because of his honesty, he had inevitably to reach; the point where I was waiting for him. And I did not await him there in triumph but in bitterness. He is an honest person, he fought his battles, and he lost. But what mattered in his life, and mattered to me too as his friend, is that he had fought. The fact that I had known from the start the bitter fruit he was going to harvest, never made me feel in his regard as if I were in the right.

And this is the true reason, deep and awful (yes, awful too) for you letter of last Saturday: that you feel you are in the right and see me, your friend, moving off in a different direction. That is why you are apprehensive, dismayed, why you feel the impulse to stop me, to save me. These are sincere feelings and perturbations which I here and now, in this country of ours where we are still free to err, can attribute to your friendship, to your way of conceiving friendship (a way which I could, still here and now, call very Sicilian).

But what would your apprehension be, and your dismay, your anxiety to save my soul, in a country or a system where all souls have to be saved and one is not free to err?

I have skimmed through quite a few inquisitorial trials, especially those of the 17th Century, and I assure you that from the greater part of them one gains the impression of an authentic, sincere, passionate desire of the inquisitors to save the souls of the those being tried. I do not mean to say by this that I consider your letter some kind of inquisitional investigation of my decision which you consider mistaken. On the contrary, I consider it a proof of friendship, of your friendship. Mine for you is a little different: I don't want to save your soul.

A man from my home town used to close discussions by saying: "We agree, but we have different ideas". We used to laugh at that, but the remark makes more sense than it would seem at first. We too, dear Renato, agree on many things, but we have different ideas. Let us be satisfied with agreeing on a few points. And let us continue, as long as one still can, to have different ideas.