BOOKS
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the end, the enterprises of both fail- Di Blasi's premature revolution–
ary conspiracy brings him to the guillotine; Vella simply becomes
bored and throws over his game, going willingly to prison out of
noia,
the one vulnerability of the nihilist. But each has given us an
alternative to admire, an attitude.
As Lampedusa went back to the period of the
Risorgimento,
the
epic era of nationalization which brought hope and then disappoint–
ment to Sicily, Sciascia reaches still further back into the past in
The C.ouncil .of Egypt
to recount an episode out of the time when
the French Revolution threw its sparks of idealist ardor into Europe's
darkest corners, often to
be
extinguished in a moment. Perhaps all
Sicilian history seems to many Sicilians to confirm their ingrained
pessimism. For the present generation, of course, there is the ironic
lesson of the postwar period. Whatever the triumph of the Resistance
meant to the rest of Italy, in Sicily the victory over Fascism achieved
by the American invasion brought back the Mafia in greater power
than ever before. The conclusion of Sciascia's historical novel is never–
theless less dark than that of
The Leopard,
which lacked the image of
a heroic Di Blasi, giving us instead only the superb and refined pas–
sivity of the prince, who anticipates an inevitable worsening of things.
At the end of
Mafia Vendetta,
Captain Bellodi, thinking over his
Sicilian experiences, vows to return, even if, he says, "Mi ci romper<>
la testa," "I break my head doing so" (which the present translation
tamely gives as "even if it's the death of me"). But Sciascia's con–
fidence in the value of idealism in Sicily is not a secure one. His
most recent novel, not yet available in English, confronts the view–
point of stoic despair with no such alternative any longer as Di Blasi
or Captain Bellodi. In this second "giallo," which implicates not so
much the organized Mafia, this time, as the state of mind which has
been termed "lowercase mafia," the "detective" is only an un–
committed school teacher who somewhat idly, out of intellectual
curiosity, gets at the truth about
:a
murder. He does not intend to tell
the police about his discoveries, but such an attitude, of course, is
incomprehensible to those around him, and he dies for his pains, just as
if he had believed
in
justice and retribution. His epitaph, spoken
by a more prudent observer, is: "He was a cretin." The stone wall
against which Captain BeIIodi was willing to break his head is stouter
than ever.
Millicent Bell
