ABSTRACT: Shortly after the demise of Leonardo Sciascia, Marco Pannella commemorates the man who gave birth to "the dramatic certainty of words, of freedom, of law, of wisdom and love".

(Radical News n.248 of 14 November)

With the demise of Leonardo Sciascia there also disappears a man of old and hopefully future times. In the obscurity of real democracies and in the desolation of our century, Leonardo Sciascia conceived and gave birth to the certainty, the dramatic certainty, necessary to life, of words, of freedom, of law, of wisdom and love.

With devotion and grief, Sciascia cultivated in himself and in us, the Candides necessary to the life of the etnos and the ethos of our time. Innocent, dramatically free and responsible, humble and strong, not simply candid and liberated, improbable and cynical, as Voltaire's hero. Of his Diderot, as of his Sicilians, Sciascia gave us the longing and inexhaustible hope for a society characterized by tolerance, wisdom and nobleness, as well as by existential malaise.

Sciascia had been and will be forever a model. He lead us to the quest, to his quest, in the punctuality of the past and in that of the present, with love, rigour and force, with unsurpassable culture and mastery.

I am listening to his voice on Radio Radicale, this Sciascia-like institution for its method and its awareness, at times also in its outcome. The charm of his wavering pronunciation and of his confident words make him into an extraordinary orator. He was wrong, and I was right, when he said that I was blinded by love when I told him so.

He has been the most intelligent of Europeans in politics. The first, and practically the only one in our literature and in our civil life, to immortalize the aberration of the Mafia. This is why he was and is the strongest reference point and the most enlightened of legislators before the anti-mafia institutions, the Mafia and the institutions heirs of its culture and of its arrogant, almost sacred intolerance.

Sciascia warned that the law, that its certainty, the certainty of rules, that equality of all people before the law are values that must be opposed to the "emergency" of evil, be it "political" or "criminal" evil. And, until yesterday, he felt the agony of the stoning of its truth and identity, operated in Palermo or in Rome, everywhere, on himself, on his identity, almost on his own body, through the stoning of his own image. With the demise of Leonardo, I am bereft of the only person I could go to to ask for advice, to follow him, in the most difficult moments of my life and perhaps of the life of this country, always certain to receive a warm welcome and an answer.

Neither our State, nor the "literary" institutions of the world, have honoured - as they could have - the person, the writer, the citizen.

The fact that he honoured the Italian Parliament and - albeit for a short period - the European Parliament with his presence, thanks to the Radical Party and to its electors; the fact that in all the battles of freedom and civil rights we have fought, his words, his advice, his consent have never failed us, all this makes us feel alone, terribly alone, in Moscow and in Rome, in Prague or in Canada, everywhere: in Palermo, or in Catania.

For this reason, if anything, we can feel the love, the tremendous grief of Maria, of Anna Maria and Laura not just with our hearts, and know we are close to them.

Instead, I shall not be close to him physically, at his funerals. There will be those televisions, those mass media, those powerful and false friends who tried to hurt him, to prostrate him, to deface him, to make him be underestimated, without succeeding; and that, with him gone, will continue their mafia-antimafia work in Rome, in Palermo, elsewhere.

We shall publish the speeches and the interviews given by Leonardo, and will broadcast them often on Radio Radicale and Teleroma 56, so that - missing him so painfully today - his words will not remain absent for long, for too long, from Sicily and Italy.