ABSTRACT: On the death of retired Carabinieri General Renato Candida, the author remembers how he wrote a trailblazing book on the Mafia. Candida had witnessed the passage of the rural Mafia to that of the contract tenders, when, if there had been the will, one could have blocked the "transition" to a new phase.

But now Sciascia only wants to remember "the man, the friend". He had met him in Racalmuto, and had appreciated his declared anti-Fascism and aversion for the Mafia. Between the two of them an "understanding" begins that could seem impossible. They even became friends and often met. Sciascia himself took Candida's book on the Mafia to the publisher a, but it is not true that he urged cutting passages denouncing collusion between the Mafia and the Communist Party. What worried Candida was the DC (Christian Democratic Party) and not the PCI (Italian Communist Party). Because of the book Candida was transferred to Turin, where the author often had the chance to meet him. Finally he relates some episodes told to him by Candida concerning the absurd behaviour that can also be found among the Carabinieri.

(LA STAMPA, November 11, 1988)

Renato Candida, retired Carabinieri general, died in Turin on the eleventh of last month. Except for this newspaper, nobody seems to have remembered, despite all the talk about the Mafia, that Candida wrote a book that was a good thirty two years ahead of its time in breaking the silence that the institutions and the men who represent it rigorously maintained and in the will to defeat it which today seems to have spread to the institutions as well as in the consciousness of the Italian people. And it was a precursor, this book, in giving a first-hand account, which the author gathered from his operations as commander of the Agrigento Carabinieri detachment against a Mafia that had returned to its pre-Fascist vigour on the ruins of the war and with the assent, the favour, of the American occupation forces and the use they made of it.

The old Mafia, then, connected to the agrarian economy in those rather wretched years. But it was just then, when it fell under the sagacious gaze of Candida, that it began to pass to much broader and more diverse activities: public works, the distribution of funds for assistance and reform. It was a crucial moment in which political will, the will of the state, would have been able to block the passage, to strangle it. And instead it opted for, to say the least, that "proximity" which today is discussed on the judicial level. But I do not want now to return to speaking of his book: I amply reviewed it as soon as it came out in the review »Tempo presente ; and later, in 1983, I wrote a preface to its fourth edition. Now I want to remember the man, my friend.

We met in the summer of 1956. I had just published »Le parrocchie di Regalpetra a few months earlier. Candida had read it and wrote to say that he would like us to meet. We met at my house in Racalmuto. He was a likeable man, open, witty. And this I must say, and possibly it is because I knew very few, but he was the first truly anti-Fascist official I had ever met. The roots of his aversion for the Mafia lay right there, in his anti-Fascism. This could appear paradoxical in a milieu in which aversion for the Mafia was also - or perhaps only - regret. And yet his was exact knowledge, exact understanding. And I must add that this immediately created intimacy between us, an understanding that at the time it seemed impossible - and in fact so it was - for me to be able to reach with a representative, as the phrase goes, of the forces of order since I believe myself then to have been yearning for another kind of order.

We became friends. We met frequently, at least twice a week, in the village or at my house in the country. And in Agrigento too, in his office. He was writing his book on the Mafia. When he had finished it I took it to Caltanisetta, to my friend the publisher Salvatore Sciascia. And he published it immediately, without the slightest hesitation. Someone then dared to say that I, urged by my friend Luigi Cortese, the Communist whip in the regional assembly, had asked Candida to cut out the parts of the book that pointed to collusion between Communists and Mafiosi. Nothing could be more false; and furthermore, there are some things of this kind in the book. It was not the Communists who worried Candida in his role as commander of the Agrigento Carabinieri detachment, but the Christian Democrats. And he tried, precisely among the young Christian Democrats to implant an anti-Mafia conscience. He met and talked with them. And I remember a provincial congress of the Christian Democrats in which those youths ma

de some quite courageous speeches and many which at that moment were pertinent to the dangerous "proximity" that had established itself between politicians and Mafiosi. At that time the Public Prosecutor was of the same opinion and Candida had a good working relationship with him.

But the publication of the book signalled the arrest of what little had been set in motion. It looked as if they really wanted to transfer him at once, that Carabinieri major who had treacherously affirmed things that the government denied. But they patiently let him stay in Palermo for about another year so that it would not be thought he had been instantly punished. And then they sent him to the Carabinieri school in Turin.

We met every time I happened to be in Turin. We wrote to each other. In most recent times he wrote me letters of astonishment and sadness for the attacks that the "anti-Mafia professionals" made upon me.

We met for the last time during the Book Fair at the Caffè Platti where a meeting with readers had been organised for me. He was terribly thin, breathed heavily, could hardly keep on his feet. But he followed the whole meeting attentively and then stayed on to talk with two or three people who had asked questions regarding my attitude to the Mafia and the anti-Mafia. And then, two months ago, a last greeting by telephone. He told me it was all over with him, that we would not meet again.

I must still say of him that to his great honour he was very attached to the Carabinieri and their history. And while maintaining that it had perhaps the most integrity and was the least corruptible institution in our country, he still suffered greatly about those files that had not entirely been set aside for getting an accused person to confess his guilt. For that reason it became his custom when he was in service to arrive by surprise, at unusual hours, at the Carabinieri stations under his command: and not always, unfortunately, in vain. He told me stories of incredible stupidity and violence. One of them has remained indelibly in my memory about what happened when he was a young lieutenant in a village on the Tyrrhenian coast. One of his jobs was to inspect periodically a train or railway car in which convicts were being transferred. One time when he had boarded the train to inspect the prison car, which was a car divided into real cells, he heard cries come from one of them, the sound of blows beh

ind the walls and the door. The head guard hemmed and hawed, but he firmly ordered him to open up. A wild man came out. And he had every reason for being maddened. A convict had managed to escape from the train. In desperation, the Carabinieri guards had grabbed a porter at a wayside station and closed him up in the cell, so that the right number of convicts would be counted when the check was made. A tragicomic episode that not even the most inventive creator of Carabinieri jokes would succeed in making up.

And finally, let me say what my readers are expecting: not only in »Il giorno della civetta but in every tale I write which has an investigator in it, the figure and the mind of Renato Candida, his experience, his actions, are more or less vaguely present in my memory and my imagination.