Books

The rule of silence

Germaine Greer

Mafioso Gala Servadio (Secker and Warburg £4.90) In the summer of 1967, I was living on a farm near a small seaside town on the southern edge of the plain of Sibari. The area, though fertile, was desperately poor, since the landlords sent all its produce away to Milan and Turin. The only fruit we could buy was wormy or bruised. A cefalo (a sort of mullet) in the local market-place cost a Pound. Those lucky enough to be taken on as unskilled labour on the estates earned twelve hundred lire (75p) a day.

There were two families living on the farm—one, my friends, whose men folk worked as stable-hands for the Barone de Rosis, the other their enemies, a dairyman who worked on the neighbouring farm owned by an emigre Albanian lawyer, his Wife and three children.

At first I did not realise that the greasy dishes brought wordlessly to me at midday were made with stolen marrow-flowers and aubergines. Then I simply went under the wire and came back with my apron full of stolen food. My friends took my frittate in the same spirit that I had accepted theirs.

In the month of August the Albanian's steward came to spend his holidays on the farm. He brought his parents, his aunt, his Wife, his children and a laying hen, something of a rarity in midsummer.

Two days later the dairyman's wife faced the steward's wife across our polluted well, both white-faced and quivering. About once a. minute, in strict alternation, one would hiss an insult at the other, an insult which even to my unpractised ear seemed both highly improbable and horribly wounding. I retreated with empty buckets and watched from the kitchen window. One of the stablehand's grandchildren stole up to explain. The dairyman had been stealing milk, about fifteen litres a day. This was the day of the inevitable showdown, so his twelve-year-old daughter had wrung the neck of the steward's wife's laying hen and flung the corpse under the stairs—where she found it still warm on her way to the well.

At midday when the steward returned, the dairyman's family had moved out of their two rooms, and sat in the hot dust on the cardboard boxes that contained all they had ever managed to own. All afternoon they sat in the pitiless Calabrian sun, without. speaking, or drinking or moving; even !heir three-year-old daughter sat motionI,.ess, her little face a mask of tragic defiance. when night'fell they were still waiting for their father to come with a borrowed cart and take them God knew where.

There had been no discussion— we all would have heard it. The whole family acted as a single automaton. Instead of seeking to explain the dairyman's transgression, only too explicable in their economic circumstances, they had deliberately rendered it unpardonable by their own acts of dispetio. As a hermetic, non-rational group, they had accepted criminality and compounded it.

The personal feelings of these people were not regulated by family loyalty; their personal feelings were family loyalty. The family both conferred strength and constituted vulnerability. The action of any member of this organic network affected the whole organism. None of my Calabrian neighbours was ever alone, or ever wished to be. Every act involved complicity. My attempts to awaken a feeling of individual responsibility were unavailing. They pitied me, a woman alone, and sent their children to keep me company.

They watched impassive as always when I, a thief like they, egregiously complained to the Guardia di Finanza about the lorries that rumbled beneath my windows at three in the morning on their way to collect the contraband cigarettes being unloaded on the beach a hundred yards away. They decided I was really crazy when I stole the dynamite that mafiosi were using to bomb the sea, and told the mafiosi to go to the police and report the theft. My behaviour had none of the simplicity, the dignity or the rigour of theirs. They saw it as simple softheadedness and mostly ridiculous. Ideas of social justice, of freedom for the individual, of a non-violent, non-criminal life were contemptible wishful thinking. A people colonised for two thousand years, their survival had depended upon their refusal to absorb the ideology of the colonists. The family was reality, the community a fantasy, the state an enemy.

In her impressive compilation of facts about the Mafia, Gaia Servadio takes intellectual account of its historical evolution, but she does not convey its emotional logic, possibly because in Sicily, the profound impact of the American experience has largely obliterated it. Mafia is the authoritarian family mentality which has become an organising principle; as such it is the paradigm of entrepreneurial organisation. It begins at the point where modern management training ends, with the creation of the organisation man. (Nixon, former bagman for Meyer Lansky, is a perfect example.) The result, in capitalist economies, is the huge, impersonal agglomerate acting solely in its own interest, in clear-headed disregard of muddled notions of the public good. The result in Sicily, now that the mafia has learnt from the mega-economy of the USA what is actually possible, is not much different. The mafioso Christian Democrat, Graziano Verzotto has left a monument to his memory: Syracuse, a city which only fifteen years ago was a gem, is now: strangled by petrol refineries which surround from all sides (and employ only a handful of men). Real estate development has been, if possible, . even more brutal than in Palermo ...

Mafioso is a painstakingly researched indictment of the Sicilian mafia, but as long as Gaia Servadio insists on searching for an organisation which can be excised like a discrete tumour, she fails to give an adequate impression of the soft, shapeless, invasive malignancy, only the visible part of which is called mafia. My Calabrian friends were afraid of the mafia, a word they had learned from the mass media to apply to a reality whose working they saw around them every day, because it represented alien power, landlords and police. But if they had been offered its protection and a share in the spoil they would have accepted joyfully, and carried out their duties as readily as the dairyman's daughter strangled the hen. The condition is malignant because of what Dolci calls waste, the terrible crushing of human potential by patriarchal collectivism, which in its amorality and ruthlessness, is better geared for efficient profiteering than the bumbling, hypocritical modes of monopoly capitalism.

Gaia Servadio clearly detests the mafia, as well as being fascinated by it, partly because of idealist socialist sentiment and partly out of outrage at its violence and cruelty; but she does not see that the intrinsically anti-democratic character of the mafia is more repugnant than its violence. The mafioso has a concept of human personality which makes democracy seem absurd. The ease with which mafioso suborn democrats confirms their own view, both in their eyes and the eyes of the poor whom they oppress. Abbie Hoffman told me, in 1971, that the Yippy demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Convention had been protected by the Chicago mafiawhich, if it is true, may go some way to explaining why he is now on the run for an offence involving a large amount of cocaine. The lamentable history of the Teamsters' Union is a more significant example of the same process.

The juridical means by which the mafia may be controlled are all more effective against the victims of the mafia than against their oppressors. In that fact we may see the proof that mafia, like cancer, is of the same nature as the organism which harbours it.

Gaia Servadio does not point out that the Valpreda law, under which mafioso stay out of jail while their cases wander through the judicial process, was passed because of the long detention of an anarchist framed for the bombing of Piazza Fontana.

Gala Servadio tries to limit her concept of Mafia to the Sicilian cosche, but finds she cannot. She tries to define her subject, while admitting that it has changed and spread beyond its birthplace and occasionally, rather flirtatiously, hinting that it is no more than a red herring in the pursuit of organised crime (it was certainly used in this way by the FBI). She tries to deglamorise her subject, to present mafia executioners as cowardly thugs, but is troubled by the sort of thing that Sicilians said about the machine-gunning of market-gardeners in Victoria, 'Questa non e . She utters a vague warning about the vulnerability of the wallowing bureaucracy of the EEC to mafia infiltration, when the manipulation of the butter subsidies has already provided a classic case of Sicilian-type exploitation. She minimises the possibility of mafia-style power structures in England, although Sindona's friends and colleagues still dine at the Turf Club.

She herself is aware that if her book revealed anything that the mafia were concerned to hide it would never have appeared. When she interviews a capontafia (Vito Guarrasi ?), who tells her nothing, she does not name the names he names and worst of all does not name him. By such coy omerta she undoes her own contempt and indignation and enhances the myth of mafia omnipotence, unwittingly abetting the criminals in classic liberal fashion.