some occasion which took the public fancy, and they keep on repeating it because it makes a dramatic close.
Giovanni Grasso has a play called Omertà: La Legge del Silenzio. Don Andrea has been murdered by or at the instigation of Don Totò (Salvatore), who is an overbearing bully, nevertheless Saru (Rosario) has been sent to prison for the crime and, during his absence, his girl has married Don Totò. The play opens with the return from prison of Saru, acted by Giovanni. He comes to the house of his mother, with whom Don Totò and his wife are living. The length of the play is provided by the disappointments attending his return: his setting up for himself and painting paladins on Sicilian carts; a scene of passionate tenderness with his mother, during which he convinces her of his innocence, but refuses to reveal the name of the murderer which he has learnt in prison; a beautiful interview with Pasqualino, his young brother, who shows he is the right sort of boy by declaring of his own accord that he hates Don Totò; a magnificent interrupted quarrel with Don Totò, and scenes with the police and with the priest to whom Saru refuses to give any information about the murder. Towards the end Saru staggers in wounded. They all try to make him tell the name of his murderer, but he will not. Finally, he is left alone with Pasqualino to whom he gives his revolver with these dying words:
“For Don Totò, when you shall be eighteen.”
Pasqualino understands, kisses the pistol and accepts the obligation, saying:
“I will see to it.”
The others return and ask Pasqualino whether Saru told him anything before he died, and Pasqualino, concealing the pistol in his bosom as the Spartan boy concealed the fox, bravely answers:
“Nothing.”
One may object to the play on the ground that it breaks off instead of coming to a conclusion—one is left wishing to see Pasqualino, grown up and acted by Giovanni, executing
the vendetta—but it is a good play and shows what is meant by omertà. The dramatic critic of the Times (2 March, 1910), on the morning after Giovanni produced it in London, opened his notice of it thus: “Omertà must make things very difficult for the Sicilian police.” This is precisely what they intend.
Without omertà the mafia would hardly flourish, and the mafia is not so easy to understand. I suppose the reason why Sicilians explain it badly is that they understand it too well. The inquiring outsider cannot see the trees for the wood, and the explaining insider cannot see the wood for the trees. They labour to make clear things with which I am familiar, and take for granted things which are strange to me, treating me rather as my father treated the judges before whom he was arguing some legal point. Their lordships interrupted him: