Honoured Society by Norman Lewis Read Free Book Online

a hospital with a helicopter landing-stage on its roof, to which rich patients were brought to be exposed to the saintly influence. Books were sold by the hundred thousand, describing Padre Pio’s miracles, and records by the million of the father saying mass or at prayer. The photographs of the monk displaying his wounds would not have convinced the hardened sceptic, as the negative had obviously been subjected to crude retouching and the prints daubed all over with a red dye, but they were happily bought by the pilgrims who poured into San Giovanni Rotondo. Such was the clamour to be confessed by Padre Pio (ninety-five per cent of the applicants were women), that confessions had to be booked, and the waiting-list grew so long that pilgrims had to spend days and even weeks in the town’s expensive hotels awaiting their turn. By arrangement with the Mafia, however, and on payment of a substantial sum, the queue could be jumped. Mafia agents waited, too, at the bus terminals, ready to carry off new arrivals to be confessed on the spot for sums varying between two and five thousand lire by false Padre Pios who awaited their prey in hastily faked-up backstreet rooms. Most impudent of all was the sale of revolting relics of the monk’s ‘stigmata’ – hundreds of yards of blood-soaked bandages displayed on market stalls outside the convent. Even when in 1960 the newspapers published analyses showing the blood to be that of chickens, the sales did not slacken.
    It is this scene of the Mafia presiding over charlatans selling cock’s blood and amulets against the evil eye that reminds us how fully the wheel has turned. The Mafia that had come into being as the peasants’ refuge against the worst abuses of the Middle Ages now gleefully resuscitatedall the bagful of medieval tricks to exploit the peasants’ ignorance. The Mafia that had fought feudalism, that had lain in wait on the moonless night for the baron no officer of the law could touch, now elected and manipulated politicians who would guarantee to fight for the survival of the feudal order. But far worse was to come under the absolute rule of Don Calogero Vizzini, General Mafia of Villalba, still known as ‘ Il Buonanima – the Good Soul’ to the many thousands who cherish his memory. It was Don Calò whose hired killers silenced the voices of protest when the postwar democracy turned out to be a crueller fake than Fascism itself. And when the voices crying in the wilderness of the Sicilian feudal estates swelled into a furious chorus, it was Don Calò and his feudal allies who called in Giuliano, the cleverest and bloodiest bandit in Sicilian history, to fight their battles for them.

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    C ALOGERO VIZZINI, the patriarch of Villalba, was born in 1877. His father was a peasant who had been sufficiently astute, as well as personable enough, to marry into a family very slightly more elevated than his own, although still far from middle-class. The Scarlatas owned a few square yards of land – a rare distinction in a feudal community composed almost entirely of day labourers and sharecroppers. They enjoyed, moreover, exceptional prestige in Villalba from the fact that a member of the family had risen to high eminence in the Church.
    In defining these matters of social prestige, it has to be remembered that life as lived by the citizens of Villalba is singularly devoid of the incentives and the rewards one takes for granted in a modern community of its size. Most foreigners who have visited Sicily carry with them a mental picture of resorts such as Taormina whose sole purpose is the gratification of the foreign visitor, of the ancient towns of Catania or Syracusa, and of the oriental brilliance and colour of the landscapes squeezed between the volcano Etna’s huge paws of lava.
    The western Sicily that so few have seen is harsh, lacking in grace, and as utilitarian in its way as the Black Country of England. There are a hundred small and shabby towns like Villalba,