The Savage Shore by David Hewson

Author:David Hewson [David Hewson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2018-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

PART FIVE

The Sicilians

Calabrian Tales

Chapter XVI: The Land Across the Water

The Strait of Messina is a narrow stretch of water, treacherous on occasion as we’ve discussed. Yet the world on the other side is so different to ours it may as well be an ocean. Sicily and Calabria are neighbours thanks to geography, nothing more. In temperament and in breeding we are races apart.

Calabrians cherish their Greek heritage; Sicilians are proud of their polyglot origins. True you will still find traces of Ancient Greece in places, but so many foreign invaders have crossed that soil since: Carthaginians, German Vandals, Ostrogoths, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, yet more Germans the Swabians, the Spanish … And not long before I write the invasion of a very large number of Americans. All have left their mark in Sicilian faces, pale and swarthy, in blue eyes and green, in hair that may be black as the Africans or a Scandinavian blonde.

Relatives some may be from the arrival of those Catalan brothers three centuries ago, but even in the dark arts of criminality they differ too. We have the ’Ndrangheta, a quiet, self-effacing and purposeful fraternity that, in many ways, acts as a quasi-government in the shadows. The Sicilians are louder, more interested in money and power and women than the tedious task of keeping people fed. Their organisation is best called the Cosa Nostra – ‘our thing’ – though it is commonly referred to as the Mafia as well. Where Cosa Nostra comes from no one knows for sure. Mafia probably stems from the Sicilian adjective mafiusu which may mean ‘swaggering’ or ‘fearless’. Or perhaps both.

Modesty has never been a Sicilian virtue. As evidence I must quote the historian Giuseppe Pitrè who wrote: ‘Mafia is the consciousness of one’s own worth, the exaggerated concept of individual force as the sole arbiter of every conflict, of every clash of interests or ideas.’

Also I must cite this bold statement, ‘if by the word “mafia” we understand a sense of honour pitched in the highest key; a refusal to tolerate anyone’s prominence or overbearing behaviour … a generosity of spirit which, while it meets strength head on, is indulgent to the weak; loyalty to friends … If such feelings and such behaviour are what people mean by “the mafia” … then we are actually speaking of the special characteristics of the Sicilian soul: and I declare that I am a mafioso, and proud to be one.’

These last are the words of the ‘liberal’ professor of law and son of Palermo Vittorio Orlando who was, albeit briefly, prime minister of Italy, a onetime Minister of Justice, and now, as I write these words in a nation recovering from one more terrible war, a Roman senator for life.

I trust you understand, dear reader. The food is good, the island beautiful in parts, the history, the monuments, the ruins more visible than our own. For all that the Sicilians will always have ideas above their station. One forgets that at one’s peril.

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