ABSTRACT: He denies that intellectuals as a category can be burdened with a distinct responsibility with regard to the lavish (or less than lavish) commitment following the assassination of General Dalla Chiesa (1): there is no category of intellectuals, "every intellectual is a monad" who answers only for what he himself does. But he feels himself dragged into the case by the "accusation" made by the general's son, who deplores the fact that only after the assassination did the writer reveal that it was not Dalla Chiesa who provided the model for the figure of the Carabinieri captain in »Il Giorno della civetta (2). He declares that he felt no need of a denial or clarification before the general's death, when he, Sciascia, ran the risk of looking like a prophet. Nevertheless he rejects the reproof for having deplored that Dalla Chiesa did not take sufficient precautions. By thus affirming that Dalla Chiesa had not understood that the Mafia had changed into a "multinational of crime" he feels that he is not

responsible for "playing along with the Mafia's game". But it is necessary to avoid camouflaging the figure of the general as his son also tended to do. For this reason it is a mystification to lament that Dalla Chiesa was not granted "certain powers". In Sicily the police already have too much power. But he reiterates certain of his other doubts concerning the behaviour of the general in the episode of the death of the Red Brigadier Peci (3) in Genoa, as well as his affiliations with the P2 Lodge (4).

(L'ESPRESSO, February 20, 1983)

For reasons of health I have recently read very few newspapers and weeklies. I had already felt that by not reading them one was a little better off and certainly not worse off. But not reading them is not enough to keep the news at a distance: there is always some good Samaritan who will bring it to you. Since I am not unaware that there is a dispute going on in the newspapers set off by a letter - which I later read - written by

General Dalla Chiesa's son to the intellectuals ("Dear intellectuals..."). And the dispute was between those who maintain that after the assassination of the general the commitment of the intellectuals was not very vibrant and those who maintain that the intellectuals are not obliged to take on such commitments and, on the contrary, it would be much better if they did not. The dispute seems to me highly abstract and gratuitous. Not only do I not manage to see intellectuals as forming a body in themselves, but I have such a vast idea of the intellectual world as to include in it anyone capable of being intelligent, of having intelligence of reality. I do not believe that one can restrict the intelligent world to those who have to do with printed paper or other communication media. And I think the proof of this can be found in the fact, daily verifiable, that many of those who write books or articles are not in the least capable of reading reality, understanding it, judging it. I know people of cosmic stupidi

ty who find the doors of publishers and newspapers thrown open wide to them, and I presume that there are in circulation among us more than a well-ordered society can support without collapsing.

Up to this point, therefore, when one speaks to the intellectuals as members of a single body, a category or corporation, I do not feel myself involved. Even if one were to admit of restricting intellectuals to those who are professionally definable as such, I think one can unhesitatingly affirm that within the corporation exist as many types of intellectuals as there - so to speak - members. Every intellectual is a monad. And there are monads with doors and windows and there are closed monads. And no one should hazard to suggest - in view of not-long-off and evil experiences - that the closed monad (in its own room, the library, the labyrinth) deserves to be ostracised or despised while the open monad is to be cultivated, preferred, and privileged. There are wide open monads that are totally blind, and closed monads that see everything.

Since I do not consider that I am part of any category, corporation or union, then, if someone runs after me shouting intellectual, I do not even turn around. I turn and answer when I am called by name, but on the condition, let it be understood, that the questions make some sense, that they are not dictated by stupidity or bad faith, that they do not concern things I have already said, by which I mean already written. Repetition can be of use to the ignorant, but in printed-paper spheres and among those who work in that sphere, ignorance - even if it exists - is no excuse, just as it is no excuse before the law.

A sensible question would, for example, be this one which the son of General Dalla Chiesa formulated as an accusation in my regard (not in the letter to "Dear intellectual", but in an interview in a weekly): Why had I allowed it to be believed for years that Gen. Dalla Chiesa had been the inspiration for the Carabinieri captain in »Il Giorno della civetta and only decided to deny it after he was killed?

I confess that it is a question which I would be loathe to answer, that I would feel pulled by my hair to do so. But it is a legitimate question. And here is the answer: that it gave me pleasure if General Dalla Chiesa identified with that figure, and it seemed to me (to me and to any citizen who had democracy at heart) to be a reassuring sign. And I said as much on one occasion for which »L'Unità reproved me. And it seemed pointless to me to establish the trifling fact that at the time (1961) I did not even know Dalla Chiesa existed, and that if anyone was a model for that personage it was Major Renato Candida. What difference did it make? Evidently there was more than one Carabinieri officer of that type available then. But when Dalla Chiesa was killed, and not only was there a horde of journalists unleashed around me as a clairvoyant but even my publisher returned to publicising the book, indirectly taking advantage of the "prophecy", I felt it my duty to clear up that small question which I had unt

il then kept unspoken.

I detest being taken for a prophet. I am the sort who says that two and two make four. But precisely from the time I wrote »Il Giorno della civetta you can almost count on it that with every book I publish and everything of any importance that I do, there is someone, now representing one point of view and now another, who pops up to say that I have got it all wrong - except in the face of the ascertained facts when the gift of prophecy is attributed to me. Which I do not have.

The same thing is happening with regard to my article published in »Corriere della Sera on September 19 of last year. Someone popped up to reprove me with the idea that two and two do not make four but three or five. The son of the general arrived to affirm in an interview that with my declaration I was "playing along with the Mafia" because I stated that his father had not understood what the new Mafia is. And he adds: "Quite the opposite is true". An affirmation which may have its justification in sentiments and resentments but which is lacking all consistency, which is empty rhetoric where the actual truth is concerned. General Cappuzzo, an experienced man and a Sicilian, said the same things on September 29 that I had said on the 19th. In fact, he had been even more explicit when at a certain point he said: "This official, who at his age married a young woman, probably did not want his sphere and his precautions to weigh her down, the lack of free movement, the coercions, for which reason he probab

ly went too far in the other direction. Furthermore he confided that they would not dare try to kill him."

In short, he had not understood the Mafia in its transformation into a "multinational of crime", in a certain sense equivalent to terrorism and no longer having any rules of co-existence, of connivance with the power of the state and with the customs, traditions and ways of being Sicilian. The phrase that the newspapers attributed to President Pertini (5) - "They might at least have spared his wife" - arose in effect from the same ingenuousness that dictated Dalla Chiesa's behaviour: by now the Mafia not only killed judges, Carabinieri and police officers, politicians of the parties that fought them, but also their wives (the wife of Sirchia in front of the Ucciardone prison).

Now what I do not understand is why in stating such things one is "playing along with the Mafia" (is General Cappuzzo doing so too?). One is not playing along with the game of national and family rhetoric, that is true enough. But to say that one is playing along with the Mafia is gratuitous and stupid defamation. If General Dalla Chiesa's son continues to affirm that things are exactly the opposite, he has two obligations: first, he must demonstrate with documentation that the general had got his hands on something that was of immediate peril for the Mafia; second, he must get to work and offer - since he is a professional sociologist - a description of the present Mafia which contradicts the one I have tried to trace in brief. If he does neither the one or the other, he will only confuse the public by agitating and inveighing. Already in the interview I mentioned, General Cappuzzo affirmed that all the rhetoric was threatening to spoil Dalla Chiesa's image: "All the garnishing that tends to make a ro

mantic figure of him, let us say, ends by damaging him. Therefore I would be very cautious. Let us stick to the facts. And the facts are the ones we know".

General Cappuzzo's recommendation for caution has not been followed. So - pulled by my hair, as I have said - I must tell those who think they can say whatever they please, something which they most certainly will not want to hear. And that is, that to make dramatic accusations regarding the powers that were not given to General Dalla Chiesa in Sicily, to make people believe that as soon as he had been given certain powers the general would have pulled out of a hat a radical panacea against the Mafia, is a deception. We do not know what powers a democratic state can give to a police chief, even when he is invested with a special function, without going against its own essence. Already the Sicilian police and judiciary have enough a-constitutional if not anti-constitutional powers, such as that of imposing forced residence which has been revived. What else would you have? a curfew, mass deportation, wholesale slaughter? I am convinced that General Dalla Chiesa already had too much power to fight terroris

m, and descended from them is that law about penitent criminals which I hope no one is going to tell me has anything to do with the spirit or the letter of the Constitution.

In the report I delivered to the President of the Moro Commission on June 22 of last year (please note: June 22, 1982) a judgement on the general is established that his tragic death cannot change. Pirandello called the dead "memory's pensioners": but we must always pension them with truth, not lies. Lies are an offence to the dead as they are to the living. And leaving aside all that anyone can read in my report and the minutes of the hearings which bear it out (once they are released from the open secrecy by which they are presently bound), I will stop at the point that everyone knows, which if they are endowed with memory they recall, which if they have the slightest love of truth they cannot remove: the Peci case and the P2 affair.

There are many points of the Peci case that leave me unconvinced, and the least of them is not the killing of Red Brigadiers in Genoa's Via Fracchia. I am far from sure, that is to say, that these people could not have been captured alive and in a way that did not involve risks for the Carabinieri who took part in the action. Nor can I allow that a police corps as well trained as the general said his was should have allowed Peci to escape the first time just because the house in which he lived had two doors. "Elementary" would say not Sherlock Holmes, but any non-commissioned officer of the Army, "almost all houses have two doors". And with regard to the P2: I am not convinced in the least that the general joined it (with the consensus of General Mino who was already part of the P2) in order to go and see what was happening there. His brother was already a member; he could have asked him. I am not indulging in posthumous malice. I am simply recalling things that in the euphoria of the celebration there

is a desire to forget and to make us forget. We are only trying to cut off the rhetoric as an excellent rule suggests. And we are trying to go forward, even without the retrospective illusion (which would be an alibi) that only General Dalla Chiesa would be capable of defeating the Mafia. I was pleased, and I declared it publicly, when he was nominated Palermo's police chief. And his death created apprehension and pain for me on the human level as well as the level of Sicilian affairs. But it is not necessary to make a myth of it nor consequently to sink into despair. There is still some hope.

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) 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.

2) »Il Giorno della civetta - A novel of Sciascia's about the Mafia.

3) 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).

4) P2 Lodge - The name of a Masonic lodge ("Propaganda 2") whose membership was secret. It's head was Licio Gelli. Indicated as the place where obscure political and great financial plots were hatched, the government closed it down in 1981 and almost all of its members were subjected to a long political and social quarantine.

5) Pertini, Sandro - (Stella 1896 - Rome 1990) Italian statesman, Socialist, imprisoned and sent into exile by the Fascists. From 1943 - 1945 fought in the Resistance. Secretary of the Socialist Party, deputy, Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies (1968 -1976), President of the Republic (1978 -1985).