ABSTRACT: Sciascia is annoyed at being considered an expert on the Mafia and dislikes having to give so many interviews on the subject. Thus, "about ten days after the assassination of Gen. Dalla Chiesa", (2) and after having given a great many interviews, he doesn't know if Bocca (3) is right or not in being irritated with him for the declarations he made, but that he cannot check on whether or not the journalist quoted him correctly. Bocca reproves him with having an image of the Mafia as something "indefinable, protean, awe-inspiring, subtle and intricate". Sciascia only recognises the adjective "protean, and recalls what I happened to write more than twenty years ago". Today one would have to admit that "with regard to drugs the Mafia is no longer the intermediary but the producer", a fact which Bocca has not noticed. Bocca also reproves him with having maintained that Dalla Chiesa went around "without a bodyguard and without taking precautions". But it is the truth and Sciascia maintains that Dalla Chi

esa behaved like that due to his literary and in any case "old-fashioned" view of the Mafia. Dalla Chiesa identified himself with the Carabinieri captain who was the hero of »Il Giorno della civetta (4) (but who was in fact modelled on the erstwhile Major Renato Candida, later transferred up north). Dalla Chiesa excluded all connections between the Mafia and political terrorism, but did not take sufficiently into account the new "subversive" character of Mafia crimes. Today's Mafia is not the same as yesterday's, it has changed: today's problem is drugs, and it is drugs which has frightened several politicians and which causes the [political] parties to try to extract themselves from the the old, usual mixtures. The Mafia is afraid of this attempt to "uncouple" and this justifies the "chain of killings that go from Boris Giuliano (5) to Dalla Chiesa".

(CORRIERE DELLA SERA, September 19, 1982)

There is nothing so irritating to me as being considered a Mafia expert, or as today the expression goes a "Mafiologist". I am nothing more than a person who was born, raised and lives in a town of western Sicily and who has always tried to understand the reality that surrounds him, the events, the people. I am as much an expert on the Mafia as I am on agriculture, emigration, popular traditions, sulphur mines - on the level of personal experience, what I have seen and sometimes gone through. And I do not like the abruptness of interviews. I prefer to reply to all questions in writing, so that they can be calm and pondered.

And yet every time there is what looks like a Mafia happening I condescend to many sudden, improvised interviews - force myself to do them and thus doing myself violence. And this for two reasons: it seems to me that I avoid a civic duty by refusing to speak; and it seems to me a lack of courtesy and respect for the work of others to close the door in the face of a person who has come a hundred kilometres to take down my opinion. And so about ten days after the assassination of General Dalla Chiesa, I found that I had given an inflated number of interviews, nor did I see all of them in the newspapers that published them. Therefore I do not know if any of the things I said was inflated, reduced or falsified, and so I cannot judge whether the irritation Giorgio Bocca has shown towards me (see La Repubblica of September 10) is based on statements of mine that were reported imprecisely or whether on things that I did in effect say and which were reported with exactitude. But it is also possible that he was

irritated for the pleasure of being irritated.

A few years ago, in a book of his on terrorism, Bocca admitted that I was the only one who had understood that the red terrorism was truly red [i.e Communist, ed.] and not black [i.e. Fascist, ed.] disguised as red as many liked to believe. And in recognising this he adds that I perhaps reached this conclusion by means of a literary man's intuition. Now, I don't know if literary men have any particular intuition. I don't think I do, and perhaps I am not a literary man. For me there are those who understand and those who do not, those who want to understand and those who couldn't care less about understanding. And Bocca's recognition that I was the only one to understand would depress me rather than exalt me if I did not know that at the time many had understood who do not write books or write for the newspapers.

However, today it seems to be precisely my literary man's intuition which annoys Bocca. According to him my view of the Mafia is of something indefinable, protean, awe-inspiring, subtle and intricate. Too many adjectives. And only one of them - protean - could with some care be allowed, but according to an objectively not subjectively protean quality. More than twenty years ago I gave a definition of the Mafia that I believe still sums it up exactly: "The Mafia is a criminal association with the purpose of illicitly enriching its own members which imposes itself by violent means as a parasitical intermediary between property and work, between production and consumption, between the citizen and the state.

After twenty years what I see as having changed is this: that where drugs are concerned the Mafia is no longer the intermediary but the producer; and that as an intermediary between the citizen and the state, in making use of the state, in being part of the state, it has not the same security as before. If Bocca has not noticed these changes, in particular the second of them, he has neither the literary man's intuition nor the historian's (some of his books have the word history in their titles), nor the journalist's. Furthermore none of these are needed, simple common sense being enough to arrive at this hypothesis. And only this hypothesis explains the subversive nature of the Mafia's crimes in recent years.

I believe it is just this idea that Bocca doesn't like, just as he certainly doesn't like to hear it said that Gen. Dalla Chiesa didn't protect himself too wisely or too well. Nothing is more evident: Gen. Dalla Chiesa went around Palermo without protection or precautions, but it seems that to say so is an offence to the general's memory and an obstacle to the fight against the Mafia.

Not many years ago, to make it impossible to utter certain truths, one said that they played along with the game of someone or something that one was supposed rather to fight. Today the interdiction of the truth is given over to the expression "objective alliance". This is insupportable blackmail and I do not support it. The truth, whether a big or a little truth, does not establish "objective alliances" with whatever it is one does not want to be allied and it only pulls the leg of truth. And so I repeat: the general did not protect himself as he should have. To say that this was sensible behaviour, because all protection is useless, all bodyguards useless, is stupid: ambushes such as the one which felled the general are subject to imponderable circumstances. And then, those who believe that in these operations the Mafia is perfect and infallible ends by crediting it with an all-seeing, omniscient and omnipotent power which it does not and cannot possess. There was much talk - and many who didn't talk

about it believed it - of the "geometric perfection" of certain Red Brigades operations. It was later seen just what stuff the Brigades are made and how their efficiency was composed of others' inefficiency. We will reach the same conclusions - at least I hope so - about the Mafia too.

I cannot claim to have known General Dalla Chiesa well. I had met him a few times in Palermo when he was the legion commander and the two times he visited the Moro Commission. I followed him as well as I could during the De Mauro (6) case. His line was different from that of Boris Giuliano. There was the Carabinieri line and the police line as, unfortunately, almost always happens. But I had the impression that Giuliano's was the more concrete approach and therefore many actions were set off to stop him. They were equally upright men, equally fervent, who did their duty to the hilt. But Giuliano had the advantage of being Sicilian. Towards the end, from Peci's (7) confession onwards, there was the tendency to make a myth of Dalla Chiesa: the best of them all against terrorism, the best of them all against the Mafia. And now that he is dead the myth-making is even stronger. There is no doubt but that in the present ruinous conditions his qualities rightly stand out. He was an old-fashioned Carabinieri o

fficer: honest, loyal, courageous. And intelligent. But he had his limitations and made his mistakes. In an old, unforgettable film of Duvivier's which takes place in a retirement home for actors, on the death of Michel Simon (I don't remember what the personages were called and so refer to them by the names of the actors), Victor Francen has to speak his eulogy. He begins by calling him a great actor, an inimitable interpreter. But then at a certain point he stops and says: "No, I can't say that", and that is when the truth gives way to the real and more moving eulogy. And so this is how it should always be for everyone. So then, General Dalla Chiesa made his mistakes - and the last, fatal one was to not have established a system for protecting his own person. To say it would have been useless is just as senseless as to say that it would certainly have worked.

To ask why he did not want to create such a system around himself is entirely natural and legitimate. And the answer we may find could be somewhat illuminating and useful. So then, why? As Savinio (8) said, I warn imbeciles that their possible reactions to what I am about to say will meet with my cold indifference. And my answer is this: the fact that General Dalla Chiesa identified with the Carabinieri captain in »Il Giorno della civetta is a demonstration, small as it may be, of what he thought of himself and the Mafia. In recent days, to re-establish the truth (and also because of my habitual discretion), I have been obliged to say that the Carabinieri official whose acquaintance and friendship spurred me to write the story was not Dalla Chiesa but Renato Candida, the erstwhile commander of the Agrigento group. Candida had acquires such knowledge and understanding of the Mafia problem that he eventually wrote a very interesting book which was published by my publisher of the same name and which I r

eviewed in the magazine »Tempo presente [Present Time, ed.]

Later I was accused in a Sicilian newspaper of having used my influence with Candida - under the urgings of a Communist deputy to Parliament - to make him remove from the book a part regarding some collusion between the Communist Party and the Mafia. An accusation which is absolutely false, and this is shown by the fact that the book does document some local collusion between Communists and Mafiosi (not between the Communist Party and the Mafia).

After the book was published Candida was officially transferred - to the Carabinieri school in Turin. And one should note how from that moment Carabinieri officers and police commissars were promptly sent away from Sicily as soon as they showed some intelligence and desire to fight the Mafia whereas now, with General Dalla Chiesa, exactly the contrary has occurred. He has been sent back to Sicily just because of his competence in dealing with the Mafia. For his intelligence and his desire to fight it.

Dragged on stage by me (and I ask his pardon for it), Candida, in »La Stampa of September 12, rightly declares that he sees no connection between himself and Captain Bellodi in »Il Giorno della Civetta . He says, in effect, what I have self-critically have always declared: that the captain in that work is too idealised, that he represents certain values and is not a real person. "The boss", says Candida, "is a real person and the marshal who works alongside Bellodi is also credible. Bellodi is less so". Dalla Chiesa, for his part, identified with this idealised, unreal person. This was his limitation. A noble limitation, but still a limitation. He had a literary and in any case "backward" image of himself and his adversary.

That such an image did not influence his practical activities one can freely admit; but that they could condition his personal behaviour is certainly possible. And one should understand that I am speaking of Dalla Chiesa as he was - as he probably was - before reading »Il Giorno della civetta and identifying with the character of Captain Bellodi. This identification is, in short, to be considered a sign, a manifestation, a symptom. And not of vanity, let it be clear.

I know for sure that the general excluded the possibility of collusion between the Sicilian Mafia and political terrorism. But I think he did not give sufficient consideration to the "subversive" nature of Mafia crimes in recent years and from which it is possible to notice a change. One can notice the reflection of such a change in the way Sicilian politicians talk about the Mafia who are members of parties considered to be ruled by or to rule the Mafia. For while before - and until the years in which the general left his post as commander of the Palermo legion - they spoke lightly and even with a swagger of about the Mafia, minimising or denying it, and making fun of those who believed in and feared it, in recent years they have begun to speak of it not only with belief but with fear - fear even visible in their faces. This means that the attempt to extricate themselves from the Mafia, and to extricate their parties, is under way. That then someone may not know how to extricate himself or has no desi

re to, may disturb or impede this general kind of will, but the fact remains that the will is there and in order to realise what is happening, we must be aware of it.

At this point one needs to summarise everything that we know about the history of the Mafia from the report of the public prosecutor Ulloa (1838) to the essays of Hobsbawm and Hess. But even those who know about this subject from hearsay will easily recognise that between Portella della Ginestra and the murder of General Dalla Chiesa there is a great difference. The relationship of reciprocal protection has certainly been ruptured between a rigidly class state and a Mafia functioning as a kind of substitute police force and reactionary avant-garde whose recompense is the exaction of certain tributes. For two reasons. One because the state is disordered, inefficient, disintegrated. For political reasons, therefore. The other - a reason we might call moral, even if it arises from precaution and calculation - is that the dealing in drugs, even though a source of huge profits, has terrified those politicians who, being by now satisfied with what they already have in the way of money and power, do not want

to run further and less protected risks.

Aside from their children, their grandchildren, their relatives who might get involved in using drugs (the family is still a rather obsessive value), no great perspicacity is needed to see that drugs are a knot which must eventually be cut by a knife, even in a country like Italy where there would appear to be no knife. But it will in any case be cut by the knives of other countries and consequently ours. And here is the place to make clear that most probably the politicians generally indicated as Mafiosi - from the Unification until today - were never directly "involved": they protected it and they were in turn protected with votes, the facilitated its business and were given a share of the profits. That their successes in the intra-party factions and elections and their profits in business had involved violence and murder, they pretended not to know. Just as the Holy Office was ignorant of the fate of heretics consigned to the secular arm. But drugs was no longer "an occasional murder", it was a vast

and continuous network of murders. And I believe that a part of the Mafia, even though a minority, felt the same way about it. That part which still has its roots in the world of farming. At the same time as this slender split arose, the theory of the "historic compromise" (9) was enunciated. This theory brought nothing good to the Communist Party, but it was good for the Christian Democrats. Those Christian Democrats who aspired to the realisation of the "historic compromise" involved the whole party in the anxiety to receive absolution from the rigorous and almost ascetic Communist Party for the many sins committed from 1948 until today, including the sin of Mafia.

From the combination of these and other things comes the attempt to get off the hook, to protect oneself - but without a true process of self-criticism and almost as if the attempt were a collection - which will then attract the historian - of personal cases, personal calculations and fears.

The Mafia in turn is afraid of this attempt of the politicians to unhook themselves. Not only does the protective tissue that surrounds it begin to unravel, but it sees that the tools for fighting it too are becoming concrete and precise. The fact that the institutions are disintegrating is not enough to make the Mafia feel secure: there are men who can make them work and who cannot easily be replaced. Thus the chain of killings that goes from Boris Giuliano to Dalla Chiesa. Thus the admonitory killing of Pio La Torre (10): to admonish the party that has the leading role in the fight against the Mafia.

I have already recalled the case of the old Mafia boss Vito Cascio-Ferro who, when convicted of a killing, told the judges that they were convicting him for a murder he never committed while they had not succeed in doing so for the many he had committed. Something of this kind is happening to the Christian Democrats today. Not the party per se, but a certain number of individual members, gave the Mafia protection, security and prosperity for years. Now that they want out the accusations of their being involved are stronger than ever. Even the Church is turning against them - a fact which merits close examination. And perhaps we will examine it.

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) The title of this article is a parody of the famous Pirandello play »Così è (se vi pare) or "That's how it is (if you think so)".

2) Dalla Chiesa, Carlo Alberto - (Saluzzo 1920 - Palermo 1982) - Carabinieri general, co-ordinator of the investigations on the »Red Brigades from 1978. He turned out to have been enrolled in Licio Gelli's Masonic Lodge "P2" but affirmed that he joined it only to keep check on its activities. Named "super" Police Chief of Palermo for the fight against the Mafia, he was killed together with his wife in Palermo on September 3.

3) Bocca, Giorgio - (Cuneo 1920) - Italian journalist, well known as a contributor to the Rome daily »La Repubblica as well as for his books and biographies, among them a life of Palmiro Togliatti.

4) Il Giorno della civetta - The title of a novel on the Mafia by Sciascia (The Day of the Owl).

5) Giuliano, Boris - Assistant Police Chief assassinated in Palermo on July 21, 1979. He was tracing the routes of Mafia capital. In June of the same year he had met with Ambrosoli, official receiver for Michele Sindona's Banca Privata Italiana, probably in order to ascertain the financial circuits being used for laundering Mafia money.

6) De Mauro, Mauro - Journalist of the Palermo daily »L'Ora , he disappeared (probably murdered) on September 6, 1970 in Palermo. He had published courageous articles on the collusion between the Mafia and politics. Before disappearing he was working on the case of ENI President Enrico Mattei's death in an air crash.

7) Peci, Patrizio - Activist of the extreme left-wing Italian terrorist group the »Red Brigades (BR). When he began collaborating with the law the BR killed his brother Roberto (August 3, 1980).

8) Savinio, Alberto - (Athens 1891 - Rome 1952) - Pseudonym of Andrea de Chirico, writer, painter, musician and brother of the painter Giorgio.

9) Historic compromise - The Communist Party policy of collaboration with the Christian Democrats that marked a water-shed in post-war Italian political life.

10) La Torre, Pio - Regional Secretary of the Communist Party, assassinated in Palermo on April 30, 1982.