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La punizione (Punishment)
Salvatore Scalia

Marsilio editore • 2006 • 135 pages

Giuseppina La Ciura
Translation: Cristina Johnston

Salvatore Scalia, journalist and dramatist, is responsible for the culture section in Catania 's ‘ La Sicilia.' His publications include ‘Teatro', ‘Trilogia del malessere' and ‘Appunti.'

 

Sciascia spoke of ‘ Sicily as Metaphor'. And of this Sicily, Catania is an important city, emblematic in its Mediterranean vitality, composed of sounds, odours, and gestures that are often violent. A city with an impudent, exhibitionist, slightly vulgar charm, even though, as Tahar Ben Jelloun notes, ‘the dominant colour is still dark grey, the grey of Etna's rocks and… even the sky takes on the colours of Etna for many months of the year'¹. On the outskirts of the splendid baroque centre of Catania's old town, the working-class quarters begin, poor and in decline, with their crumbling houses, their disconnected streets where rubbish piles up amid dog excrement and the red vomit of drunkards, with steaming butcher's shops on whose outdoor spits horse-meat roasts of an evening and with miserable rotisseries where you can buy the best rice dumpling stews², so dear to Inspector Montalbano. In their dark backstreets lives a people made ‘different' by too complicated (or indeed too simple) a history, because of their language (even if only in gestures), their rules of cohabitation, their vision of the world³. San Cristoforo is such a neighbourhood and it is the setting for the tale told by Salvatore Scalia.

May 1976. Four kids, between twelve and thirteen years old, on their little Vespas with souped up engines, ‘as thin as death, callow, dishevelled, all dressed the same, trainers, sweaters and jeans', go hunting. Hunting for naïve tourists, foreign or from the mainland, who are none the wiser. They drive around, roaring their engines and pirouetting between people, cars and street-sellers' carts. It is the first Saturday of the month, the day of the local market. The four youths are on the look-out for the right prey. Having circled round several times, they find her. The order is given. Their prey is a wrinkly old woman, plump and dressed in black, who is walking in the middle of the road regally giving way to passers-by. The onerous honour of the bag-snatch falls to Pinuccio, a novice who is on his first ‘hit'. The old woman tries to resist, falls to the ground, and then has to hand over her bag. The kids disappear ‘like thieving shadows.' They hide in the labyrinth of darkened backstreets of the casbah. The old woman stays on the ground, groaning out loud, but nobody comes forward to help her. Nobody dares touch her. A strange silence falls, and then terror takes hold. The old woman is ‘the captain', Iddu's mother, the Boss of the neighbourhood, of the city, of half of Sicily , and friend of powerful politicians in Rome … A Force.

In his code, what has just happened is a ‘breach', a crime so grave that it requires an exemplary punishment, something ‘purifying'. It is an offence that can only be washed away with blood. The youths vanish into thin air, into the deafening silence. Years later, someone will repent and reveal the truth (but is it the Truth? In the land of Pirandello , everything, as we know, ‘is as it is, if that's how it seems'). Even in this existential Noir , in which the Author, in language stripped down to the bone, masterfully brings together the tragic and the grotesque, the macabre and the obscene, the sacred and the profane, fact and legend, the epilogue is foreseen, ‘the end is known.'

‘Pity for the just', as Camus said.

 

1 Tahar Ben Jelloun. ‘L'Ange aveugle.' Edition du Seuil, 1992.
2 ‘Arancini al ragù' is a traditional Sicilian stew made with balls of rice stuffed with a variety of ingredients.
3 ‘The mafioso doesn't recognise himself as a mafioso , he lives in the Mafia as he does in his own skin.' Leonardo Sciascia in ‘A futura memoria', 1959.