»As a judge he was acute, sure of himself. Personally he was jovial. His honesty was frightening. In fact...

ABSTRACT: Sciascia tells of his encounter with Cesare Terranova (1) (only just assassinated) which took place some time ago in front of Montecitorio (2): the two of them reminisced on the different ways that had brought them both into Parliament. Sciascia spoke of his esteem for the judge - an "extrovert, full of the joy of life, at moments almost... infantile" and capable of administering justice "acutely, tenaciously and with self assurance", perhaps just because of his free and open attitude. And Sciascia remembers the man killed along with Terranova, the "unfortunate Marshal Lenin Macuso". Why was Terranova killed? Probably because he "was concerning himself with something that someone felt to be a looming or imminent threat".

(L'ESPRESSO, October 7, 1979)

I met him for the last time in front of Montecitorio. I hadn't seen him for months. As always he was serene, jovial, smiling. And smilingly we recalled the evening when he was proposed as a candidate for the House of Deputies - and my advice or wish that he should not accept it, and that he would have given me the same advice if we had seen each other before I, for my part, had accepted what I had advised him against. He told me that he was tired of being in Parliament and that, like a restful condition, he was going back to being a judge. We didn't speak of anything else. The sun was scalding, and I think he was about to go away.

So then, I had advised him against it. It seemed to me that a man like him was needed more in the judiciary, and in Sicily, than in Parliament. There was, it is true, the committee investigating the Mafia to which he could - and did - make an important contribution. But more important, I thought, was the contribution he could continue to make in administering justice, and particularly at the head of the investigating branch where he was placed. And I am not saying in relation to the Mafia, or not that alone, but above all in those obscure, uncertain, ambiguous cases which were inclined to trigger off the disastrous error - that is, the impunity of the guilty and the condemnation of the innocent.

My esteem and empathy for him had arisen - besides in a gallery in Palermo where we had often met - from two cases which he happened to be investigating and which he had solved according to truth, according to justice. The first had been in Palermo where he solved with serene intelligence and, I would say, with candour an accumulation of false evidence which other judges I dare say would have accepted and followed as true thus tragically marking the destiny of a man. The second had been in Marsala, and his discovery of the guilty party prevented the unleashing and multiplication of suspicion on the innocent (which did partly happen, but fortunately without long-lasting effects, once he left the Marsala district attorney's office to enter Parliament).

These two cases impressed me greatly. In this extroverted man, full of the joy of life, a gourmet, sometimes ingenuous and almost infantile (he collected those tiny bottles of liqueurs which, when I saw them at his house, invincibly reminded me of Graham Greene's »Our Man In Havana - and I recall his joy on the day when I made him a present that I had received as a gift of a liqueur made at San Leone in memory of Cagliostro) there was an acute, tenacious and self-assured judge. And I believe that so much acuteness, tenacity and self-assurance came precisely from candour, from taking his stance candidly before a case without preconceptions or reservations. He had the eyes and the look of a child. And certainly he will have had his difficult, implacable moments, moments which were like a death sentence to him. But they will have been cut to the measure, certainly, of his amazement when confronted with a crime, when confronted with evil, even if he confronted them every day.

And often beside him was the man who died at his side and who, it seems, threw himself in front of him to protect him from the assassins' bullets. But they would have killed him in any case, the unfortunate Marshal Lenin Mancuso, in the certainty rather than the mere suspicion that he must have known something about the things Cesare Terranova was working on (and it surprises and outrages us that in a poster pasted up in Palermo these two men, who spent almost a lifetime together as confidants and who died together should have been given a typographical distinction: Cesare Terranova's name in very big letters and Lenin Mancuso's in very small ones).

And with this I have expressed my opinion about why they were killed: Cesare Terranova was concerning himself with something that someone felt to be a looming or imminent threat. I don't believe in the vendetta coldly prepared for past offences nor in the fear of his returning to work as a judge. Isn't it probable that he had been thinking - candidly and dangerously thinking - of the killing of Vice Police Chief Giuliano?

----------------------------------------------------------------TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) Terranova, Cesare - (Petralia Soprana/Palermo 1902 - Palermo 1979) - A judge killed by the Mafia in Palermo on September 23, 1979. He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies as an independent on the Communist Party list in the Sixth and Seventh Legislatures. He was assassinated as soon as he returned to Palermo to head the office of investigations.

2) Montecitorio - The seat of the Italian Parliament's Chamber of Deputies.