they began younger and were deprived of the little education for which they now have time, and the hard work so deformed their tender bodies that they could not pass the army test. This is their modulation to the dominant, their awakening to life. It is not a pleasing prospect; nor is the early autumn of ill-health and decrepitude to which it naturally leads any more pleasing. They pass their lives in the dark, morally and physically, and frequently a sudden fall of rock cripples, if it does not destroy, the victim; then there are broken pieces of a different kind to be taken along the low dark galleries and brought up to the light.
I was in Caltanissetta one Saturday evening and saw the funeral of two who had been killed in this way that morning. First came a band playing a funeral march, that was all the more melancholy because the instruments were distressingly discordant, as though in their grief the men had not had time to tune them. Then came comrades carrying candles, and comrades bearing first one coffin, then the second, plain wooden coffins with no pall. Others carried chairs on which the coffins were rested when the bearers were changed. There were no priests. But there were priests the next day for the wedding of another comrade. Beppe told me that about 90 per cent of their funerals are conducted without priests and about 90 per cent of their weddings are conducted with priests.
They told me of one sulphur-miner who, having seen enough funerals, left the mine and went to Palermo in search of work. He was taken on by a contractor who was levelling a piece of high ground, on which blocks of dwellings have since been erected behind the Teatro Massimo, and began work at six o’clock one morning. Five minutes later he was killed and buried by a fall of earth.
In the mine they are in constant fear of this death. They work very hard and the air is bad; they come up to sleep, to eat and to gamble. The air they sleep in cannot be much better than that in the mine, for they are laid out in close huts on shelves, like rolls of stuff in a draper’s shop. They
hardly know the difference between youth and age, between spring and autumn. They scarcely get a glimpse of the landscape except on Saturdays and Sundays, and then they are intent upon something else. After their week of labour they feel the necessity of expansion; they receive their wages and go to Caltanissetta; those who are married sleep with their wives, while those who are unmarried sleep quite alone as the soldiers did after the death and burial of l’Invincible Monsieur d’Malbrough. They become free human beings for two days. I have seen the piazza full of them on Sunday morning—so full that I thought it would have been easier to walk across it, treading on their heads, than to push through the crowd. Unfortunately their notion of the life of a free human being does not stop at loafing about in the piazza. They also go to the wine shops, where they offer one another the means of forgetting that their oases of rest lie in a desert of drudgery, and sometimes this becomes the means of their forgetting everything else as well.
Gigino has written a paper upon the connection between alcoholism and crime. He told me that the consumption of alcohol in Sicily is less than in northern countries, but that there is more crime. I naturally inquired whether it would not tend to lessen the crime if the Sicilians would drink rather more. He replied that, as so often happens at the beginning of any inquiry, there are other considerations and I must not be in a hurry. As for the sulphur-miners, they need not drink more, but if they would spread fairly over the week the amount they consume during Saturday and Sunday, then, although they would risk incurring the consequences of chronic alcoholism, they would avoid those of acute alcoholism. For the need of expansion causes them to drink more than they can stand all at once, then they quarrel and commit murders. So that many of those who begin life as boys in the mine, and week after week escape the falling rocks, live to be killed in a drunken brawl, and one does not know which prospect is the more ugly.
I asked whether their condition could not be improved by raising their wages. They asked whether I wished to dislocate the commerce of the world by raising the price of sulphur. I had no such desire and, indeed, did not know, till they told me, that sulphur enters into so many manufactures as it does. Here again in seeking to ameliorate conditions with which one is imperfectly familiar one must not be in a hurry. It is not altogether a question of raising their wages, they receive from four and a half to five francs a day, which, for five days, amounts to between twenty-two francs fifty and twenty-five francs a week; there are many labourers who receive less and do more with it. Of course, they would like more wages—everyone would like more wages—but what the sulphur-miners really want is the intelligence to use wisely what they have and also some change, if it were possible, in the conditions under which their work is done. Beppe assured me that the question is not being overlooked, but it has roots which extend further and are more complicated than the galleries in the mine—roots which are tangled with the roots of other questions affecting other interests, and these again affect others. So I bowed before the other considerations and hoped that with the changes that are continually taking place in Sicily something may soon be done for the sulphur-miners, trusting that in the meantime we are not paying too dearly for the advantage of getting our sulphur so cheap.
CHAPTER XIII
OMERTÀ AND THE MAFIA
When the drunken sulphur-miners quarrel and kill one another on Saturdays and Sundays, the murderers are seldom brought to justice because of Omertà; a word which is said to be derived from uomo and to signify manliness in the sense of power of endurance, the power, for
example, of keeping silence even under torture; hence it comes to be used for an exaggeration of that natural sense of honour, that Noblesse Oblige or Decency Forbids, which makes an English schoolboy scorn to become a sneak. It may be false and foolish, it may be noble and chivalrous, whatever it is, they say, it has such a firm growth among them because the history of Sicily is the history of an island which has for centuries been misgoverned by foreigners, and the people have lost any faith they may ever have had in professional justice. If one were to be involved with a Sicilian in committing a crime, one might be perfectly certain that he would never turn King’s evidence, he would say, “Io son uomo, io non parlo” (“I am a man, I know how to hold my tongue”) and he would rather die than betray an accomplice who is his friend and probably his compare. Nor need the criminal fear that the victim or anyone in the secret whether accomplice or not, will blab. A man with a wound on his face, made obviously by a knife, will swear to the police that in drawing a cork he fell and cut himself with the bottle. He does not intend his assailant to go unpunished, but he will not have the police interfering if he can prevent it; he means to look after his own affairs himself. If a murder has been committed a crowd will collect round the murdered man—a crowd that includes the police and also the murderer—but no one has any idea who committed the crime, not even those who saw it done, and not even the dying man, who may carry his assumption of ignorance so far as to call his murderer to his side, embrace him affectionately and give him a Judas-kiss which bears a double meaning; for the police and the general public it is evidence that there can have been no ill-feeling between the two, while for the friends of the murdered man it confirms their suspicions as to the one on whom the vendetta is to be executed. So many have told me this that I cannot help thinking that, if it really is done as often as they say, it must by now have lost some of its power of deceiving the police. Probably it was done on