Sicilians sometimes claim that much of what has been stated in the foregoing chapter is now out of date, and that, with the advance of civilisation, the power of the mafia
and the respect for omertà are giving way to confidence in the police. And they go on to regret that Giovanni Grasso should have so much success with his plays in foreign countries, because they contain a great deal of mafia and mala vita which he presents with so much realism that foreigners are encouraged in the idea that all Sicilians are for ever sleeplessly going about with knives in their belts seeking to execute vendettas. But most theatre-goers know by this time that melodramas are not made up of the events of ordinary life. A man does not discover every day that he has been deceived by his wife or that his sister has been betrayed by his compare; when he does make such a discovery he may be pardoned if he loses his self-control. Anyhow, the sleepless vendetta notion is so ludicrously contrary to the fact that Sicily can afford to take the risk. One might as well treat seriously the complaint against the marionettes, that the swaggering talk of Orlando and Rinaldo encourages the boys to behave in real life as though every fancied insult must be wiped out with blood. The boys certainly do fight—they can be seen fighting in the fish-market, one armed with a basket for his shield and another with a stick for his sword, his Durlindana. But boys fight, even in England, with no marionettes to inflame their imaginations, and sometimes they cut one another; still, no one would take too seriously the exclamation of that schoolmaster who, on being called to deal with some such incident, hurried from his study muttering:
“Knives, knives—dangerous weapons; would to heaven they had never been invented!”
What was he going to do at dinner-time? And if the marionettes are to be abolished, what is the Sicilian boy to do when it is time for him to sit down to his evening meal of romance? It is even possible that if he were starved of his marionettes he would more frequently substitute the dangerous weapon for the stick.
We see Sicilian life only in bits at a time and any bit we see may turn out on investigation to be only a bit of
acting; and, whether real life or acting, we see it through the veil of romance which is held in front of it by their language and by their gestures, which cause their acting to appear more real—that is, which help it to be more deceptive. By their language I do not mean merely their words and their grammar—we also have a grammar, and our dictionary contains words as many and as expressive as theirs—the romance is rather in their attitude of mind and the consequent use they make of their words. I have read with disgust in an English newspaper an account of a squalid Pentonville murder which, as described in a contemporary Italian journal, appeared worthy to be set to music by Puccini. We are like the audience in Giovanni’s theatre—dominated by the imposing romance of the language, and we prefer to be so dominated. Or we are like the audience in the teatrino at Palermo, when the buffo performs a miracle; as soon as we get behind “la mala vita” and see it as “the life of the criminal classes” we have caught a glimpse of how the illusion is worked.
By their gestures I mean something about which in England, in France and even in Northern Italy, nothing is known. It is true that we Northerners can and do communicate with one another in gesture, but in England we mostly omit gesture and use speech, while in France and Northern Italy the gesture is only slight. A Sicilian sometimes omits words, but if he omits gestures it is only by exercising great self-control. When he is talking naturally, every muscle of his body is at work helping him to express his meaning. It is as though he had not yet learnt to trust speech, everything must be acted too, as half-educated people have not yet learnt to trust the written word and if they read must read aloud. At a cinematograph show, when a letter or telegram or the title of the piece is shown on the screen, a murmur goes round the hall; it is the people reading the writing out loud to assure themselves of its meaning. So the talking Sicilian is telling everything twice, once with his voice and once with his gestures and
there is so much oil in his backbone that there is nothing creaky, awkward or grudging in his movements; the gestures are made with an exuberance, an intensity and a natural unconscious beauty which seem to lift the matter above the plane of ordinary life. So habitual is this gesticulation that it is often useless. I have been behind the scenes in a marionette theatre, watching the man declaiming for the figures. His energy was tremendous, no wonder he drank out of a black bottle from time to time. I knew he was hidden from the audience and thought he might be suggesting movements for the marionettes to the man who was manipulating them, but that man could not see him either and was improvising the movements of the figures unaided.
The gesticulating Sicilian, however, is not more deeply moved by what he is describing than the phlegmatic Englishman is when he is quietly telling something. I have sometimes ventured to laugh at the Sicilian for his unnecessary vehemence, and he has stopped in the middle of it all and joined in the laughter. It would be extremely interesting to see Giovanni Grasso in the part of an English gentleman, a Wyndham or a Hawtrey part. I believe he would succeed because I believe he would succeed in anything he set his mind to do, but for him to reproduce an Englishman’s tranquillity would be as much of an effort as it would be for an English actor to reproduce a Sicilian’s mobility.
Their power of acting is not confined to those who are actors by profession; the love of improvising little scenes in daily life may be said to be characteristic of them. To suppose that they do this from a love of lying would be to simplify unduly; they have the artist’s power of seeing a thing in two senses at once, and they assume that they will not be misunderstood, at all events, they are not going to give it all away by explaining, and if the stranger is taken in—well, as a rule, it does not very much signify. Just as omertà makes things difficult for the Sicilian police, so this