MILLICENT BELL
acquire ironclad alibis certified by unimpeachable witnesses. And the
book succeeds beyond its end as social accusation. All along the way
we are shown the human beings who are made to play their roles
by
all that they are, all that their lives have been. Deeply informed by
their experience are the conversations of villagers and cops, petty in–
formers and big shots. And behind these portraits is history, often
revealed in the only antiquities the common people of Sicily can
call
their own, the worn and distorted words of their dialect. There is the
day the captain goes in search of a witness, also killed, and runs into
an old farmer with a dog. The farmer cautions him not to pet the
animal. "He'll let a stranger touch 'im and be reassured, and then
bite 'im," he says. The dog's name is
Barruggieddu,
which the captain
recognizes as a corruption of the word
bargello,
meaning "chief of
police"-and he realizes immediately that he will learn nothing from
a man taught to name his despicable dog after the "dogs of the law"
by centuries of racial lessons in distrust.
The primary conflict in the book exists not merely between the
captain's stratagems and his impediments, but between his own char–
acter and the world he strives to affect. An ex-Partisan and an idealist,
as well as a Northerner, he is confronted in a memorable scene with
an opposing kind of excellence in the old Mafia chief, who having
never had occasion to exercise his opponent's virtues, still recognizes
him to be, like himself, "a man" - where most others are half-men,
pygmies, arse-crawlers, or, lowest of all, "quaquaraqua," "quacking
ducks." And Captain Bellodi is honest enough to know himself honored
by the comparison; there is, in the stubborn dignity of this tough dis–
believer, something that is better, after all, than cowardice and sham.
In letting his impulses as a reformer confront their only manly alterna–
tive
in
the Sicilian peasant negativism, Sciascia states his essential theme.
The Council of Egypt,
somewhat labored and pallid by comparison,
lacks the advantage of Sciascia's main asset, his gift for recording the
behavior and speech of his contemporaries. It discovers the same con–
test of viewpoints as the earlier book in historic Palermo of the seventeen–
eighties when a clever forger created a phony Arab codex justifying
royal over aristocratic claims to inherited rights in Sicily. Guiseppe
Vella is himself indifferent to the pretensions of either party, in–
different to historic truth ; the forger merely seizes a personal op–
portunity. And his cynicism seems justified against the background
sketched in by Sciascia-a profligate nobility, a brutalized populace,
a remote and selfish royal authority. Only the young lawyer Di Blasi
dreams of a noble republic of Sicily. And this idealist, Vella's opposite,
is the one man in corrupt Palermo to win the swindler's regard. In
