To Each His Own     by Leonardo Sciascia, Translated by Adrienne Foulke Original title: A ciascuno il suo Original language: Italian Published by New York Review of Books, Inc., The Format: Paperback, 158 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.47 x 8.01 x 5.02 ISBN: 0940322528 List Price: $12.95, £8.23 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £8.23 Buy online from Amazon.com for $10.36 Published by Carcanet Pub. Date: 1992 Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover Not available for ordering Published by Carcanet Pub. Date: 1989 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 146 pages Not available for ordering Published by Cape Pub. Date: 1969 Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover, 146 pages Not available for ordering Published by Black & White Pub. Date: 1992 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 146 pages List Price: £5.95 Not available for ordering

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On the map Sicily lies like a football at Italy’s boot waiting for kickoff; many Northern Italians would like to see it booted over the sidelines, away from their prestigious national team. If Italy for the foreigner conjures up images of Florence, Dante, Michelangelo, in short the prosperous North, Sicily is like an ugly pustule way down South throbbing with corruption, vendettas and a Hispanic code of honour that would be more at home in a Garcia Lorca play. But one Sicilian writer, Leonardo Sciascia, has done much to unravel the Sicilian psyche and probe the pulses that lie beneath its mafia culture. His books are short in the manner of Sartre and Camus but with a certain journalistic quality.


Sicilian magistrate Paolo Borsellino, accused by Sciascia of ‘shop-window’ mafia hunting in 1987, confessed owing much of his knowledge of the mafia to Sciascia’s books ‘in a period in which nobody spoke about it’. Sciascia plucks away the leaves of the cosca (artichoke), an alliance of families under one godfather, to bare the Sicilian soul. He delves into a consciousness which throughout history has been shaped by foreign invaders: the Greeks, the Arabs, the Normans and the Spanish. Sicilians have never, in effect, governed themselves. The result, Gesualdo Bufalino commented was to leave Sicilians with a hotchpotch of extremes: Muslim ‘fanatical exultation’, Norman ‘loyalty and stern conscience’ and a strict code of honour tempered only by a Greek ‘sensitivity to light and harmony’.


Sciascia finds his way through the Sicilian labyrinth by surreptitious means. He hijacks the popular genre of the detective novel to hook his readers but gives them something more profound. To Each His Own has all the classic ingredients: murder, intrigue, suspense, even a detective. It reads like Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and has the same detached, matter-of-fact relation of events. The difference lies in Sciascia’s omniscient narrator and the fact that the culprit of the crime is eventually revealed (although not brought to trial). The perpetrator and the motive become clear not only to the celibate university lecturer obsessed with solving the crime; it is apparent to the whole community. But out of fear, cynicism, and lack of faith in the judiciary system, everyone shrugs their shoulders and keeps quiet. Professor Laurana himself never has any intention of exposing the crime; his intellectual curiosity was merely piqued by having an engrossing human crossword puzzle at his disposal. This, Sciascia hints, is symptomatic of a much deeper malaise in Sicilian society and one in which everyone, by family ties, politics or friendship, is implicated.


‘To be strangers in truth or in guilt, or in truth and guilt together, is a luxury one can allow oneself only when there is an ordered system,’ writes Sciascia. In Sicilian society, a loose structure based around favours and reciprocity fills the political vacuum. It never occurs to Professor Laurana to go to the authorities with his discovery because ‘centuries of contempt...had heaped on the law and all those who were its instruments a conviction, still unquenched...that the highest right and truest justice, if one really cares about it, if one is not prepared to entrust its execution to fate or to God, can come only from the barrels of a gun.’ This violent form of summary justice, Sciascia adds, is underpinned and perpetuated by the Catholic Church’s ‘concept of vicarious payment’, in which cloistered virgins assume the sins of hotheaded patriarchs. In Sicily this form of payment has become the ‘agonising religion’ of the family.


The Ransom (in the Wine-Dark Sea collection) concerns a marriage between two families of rival neighbouring towns: dull socialist Grotte and festive mafia stronghold Racalmuto (Sciascia’s hometown). The bride’s father (from Grotte) is obliged to make a deal with the Procurator General of Palermo to ensure his son-in-law is not brought to trial for the callous killing of a peasant. The bribe or ‘ransom’ he must pay is to give his youngest daughter’s hand in marriage to the Procurator General of Palermo, a sacrifice she accepts unquestioningly. However it also signifies the ransoming of hostile Racalmuto by Grotte and is a metaphor for the complicated relationships in which Sicilians are locked by fate. Euphrosyne, a medieval tale of murder and honour, also explores these complicated binds based on passions, intrigues and circumstances.


If the core of Sicilian life is the family, which rests on a staunch sense of pride and protection of its honour, then the broader ‘family’ is the mafia. A Mafia Western (again in The Wine-Dark Sea) deals with an odd occurrence that breaks the usual pattern of violence among rival mafia factions. Sciascia describes this pattern as one in which the younger and older members vie for power. Usually, the violence intensifies until the two sides agree to sit down and negotiate. Indeed, excessive brutality on one side usually indicates its desire for peace. However, on this particular occasion the violence continues unabated, fueled by a young man’s wrath against the mafia for preventing him from marrying the girl of his choice. He eventually receives his come-uppance at the hands of the ‘family’, which seeks to restore the old order, though not before wreaking havoc. Once again, Sciascia highlights Sicilian reluctance to seek help from the law, as a young mother covers up the murder of her son (who has been killed by the man he was trying to murder). The reader senses her full awareness of the circumstances of his death, which are made to seem even more appalling by the stoical manner in which she accepts it.


Catholic and religious imagery permeate Sciascia’s writing, giving it an exuberant and sensual quality. He is quintessentially Sicilian, writing about Sicilian feelings and tied to his characters by the same network of affinities and sensibilities. We are told that the train announcer in The Wine-Dark Sea evokes for the passengers ‘a vision of the face of a woman just past the first flush of youth floating in the evening sky among the overhead lines of the Termini station’. Signora Luisa’s tight-fitting black dress in To Each His Own brings to Professor Laurana’s mind the ‘abundant languid nudity of a Delacroix odalisque’. But passion, jealousy and intrigue are related with a laconic detachment reminiscent of many Latin American authors. Laurana’s erotic fixation with Signora Luisa is brought to an abrupt halt with the bland statement ‘And thus passed the whole month of October.’


Sciascia brings to his stories a wonderful Mediterranean lightness and humour. The story The Land Crossing is a wry tale of Sicilian emigrés to the United States duped by an unscrupulous sea captain. They sail for twelve days full of illusions and grand ideas about their new homeland. But when they come ashore they are astonished by how similar the roads look until their feeble attempts at English are greeted by a torrent of verbal abuse in their own Sicilian dialect. In -Demotion a comic analogy is drawn between the demotion of a local saint and the removal of Stalin from the mausoleum. A Matter of Conscience shows the disquiet a confession of infidelity in a woman’s magazine sows amongst a bunch of men at a social club. In these stories Sciascia affectionately jibes at the flaws and idiosyncrasies of Sicilian life in a way that avoids being patronising, perhaps because Sciascia himself belongs to this world.


The ‘wine-dark sea’ in the story of the same name is the red-streaked sea separating Sicily from Italy. It sums up the passionate nature of Sicily, its power to intoxicate. A Northern Italian engineer travels by train from Rome to Sicily in the company of a lively Sicilian family of schoolteachers, their two unruly sons and a quiet meditative girl we know is a relative. The train journey itself mirrors the reader’s journey through Sciascia’s personal Sicilian landscape, and here, too, Sciascia’s affection for his characters shines through. Bianchi and his family evolve from colourless strangers to complex people with their own view of the world as they grow lively and excitable, the children more and more undisciplined. They are never simple; they glow as individuals more, Sciascia suggests, than their Northern counterparts, both Italian and European. Nene is undisciplined because in Sicily there are no rules other than the ‘bonds of affection’; but he is also quick-witted and generous. Societies that view children as a problem, says Bianchi (Sciascia’s mouthpiece in the story), have a problem of continuity: in order to put satellites in space you must believe in future generations.


Reading Sciascia one has the impression that one is already walking the streets of a small Sicilian town, listening to the noises of the streets and feeling the murmurs of past love affairs and murders issuing up from the earth to mingle with the present.