The Leopard revisited
David Gilmour
Palermo In the main street of Partanna, a bleak, crumpled town in Western Sicily, stands an old stone palace. On one side of the main door a 'boutique' has been tunnelled into the ground floor; on the other a few tattered election posters flap about in the wind. The rest of the facade is peeling and the upstairs windows are boarded up. Surmounting these, and embracing the whole building, are the words: La Divina Provvidenza. It's a good enough symbol of modern Sicily — perhaps of Sicily at any time since the fall of the House of Hohenstaufen — certainly one that Don Giuseppe di Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa, would have appreciated.
It is now twenty years since the publication of Don Giuseppe's solitary novel, The Leopard (II Gattopardo), a book which, according to its English translator, 'projected an "oriental fatalism" upon the misfortunes of Sicily'. Although the author was by then dead, the novel produced a lengthy controversy, dividing the Italian literary world into gattopardisti and antigattopardisti. Catholic critics complained of its anticlericalism and its pessimistic tone; Marxist writers decided that the 'sceptical and reactionary vision' of its author prevented the book from being a great historical novel. This was feeble criticism: there was nothing reactionary about Don Giuseppe (he was a strong anti-Fascist and refused to enter public life under Mussolini) and his book contains no defence of feudal Sicily. He was as critical of his own people as he was of the new middle classes who did so well out of Italian unification. Like the central figure in The Leopard, Don Giuseppe watched 'the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without ever making, still less wanting to make, any move towards saving it'.
A civilised but impoverished aristocrat of great sensitivity, the Prince of Lampedusa understood that he had no place in the twentieth century; he knew he was almost irrelevant. His nostalgia for the past was insistent, yet he had no desire to return to the conditions of The past. He knew what was wrong with Sicily, what had been wrong for centuries: the evil combination of pride and inertia, corruption and fatalism, welded together under 'the crude brash sun, the drugging sun, which annulled every will, kept all things in servile immobility, cradled in violence and arbitrary dreams'.
He would disappear, of course, and so would his class, but the real Sicily, the island of the Cavalleria Rusticana, would not change. It was this scepticism which enraged his left-wing critics, particularly those who did not know Sicily. Like the Piedmontese official in the novel who believed the place could be cleaned up in a matter of years, they thought the attitudes and traditions of millennia — the system of clientelismo, the Mafia, and perpetual malgoverno — would be swept aside by the advent of democracy and economic progress.
Anyone who visits Sicily today can see that Don Giuseppe was right and they were wrong, that he and not they knew the meaning of the word sicilianita. 'In Sicily.' declares the Prince of Salina in The Leopard, 'it doesn't matter about doing things well or badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of "doing" at all.' It's not a case of universal apathy: the people who try to do things are invariably checked by those who don't. Embedded in every town and village, the system of patronage lives side by side, with its close relations, nepotism and corruption. Above all, and governing all, is Sicily, its atmosphere, its earthquakes, the 'comfortless and irrational' landscape, the Sicilian summer 'which is as long and glum as a Russian winter and against which we struggle with less success'.
A visit to the childhood homes of Don Giuseppe provides sufficient evidence that this scepticism was justified. The Palazzo Lampedusa was destroyed when the Americans bombed Palermo in 1943. Thirty-five years later the site remains, a heap of rubble in the heart of the old city. Not a thing has been touched, not a finger lifted to clear some of the mess or provide new housing for this overcrowded slum quarter.
In the Belice district, a dozen miles or so east of Partanna, stands the small town of Santa Margherita, where Don Giuseppe's family used to spend their summer holidays. It's a fine town, with most of the old houses still standing despite the earthquake of 1968. The ruins of the eighteenth-century palace are again untouched, the courtyards filled with rubble and great beams, the palm trees knocked sideways, some of them half-buried. The facade is cracked and the balustrade broken and an amateur fresco of the Castel San Angelo in Rome is all that remains of the interior decoration. The private theatre, recently converted into the town cinema, has gone, but two walls of the chapel still stand and the face of a bishop stares from a gaudy fresco at the wreckage.
The tragedy took place over ten years ago and, unlike the bomb in Palermo, destroyed the homes of an entire community. But no attempt has been made to revive the town or rebuild those homes. The inhabitants are crammed together in Nissen huts on the edge of the town and there they will remain — except for a few fortunate families who will be moved into two immense ten-storey blocks which are being built in the middle of Santa Margherita. From these ridiculous buildings — the absurdity of tower-blocks in the vast, desolate landscape of western Sicily is self-evident — traditional farming families will be able to gaze down at the houses and gardens of a community which. SicilY destroyed ,and the Sicilian government is too exhausted and corrupt to rebuild.
Don Giuseppe had a poor opinion of the administrative abilities of the Sicilian aristocracy but he guessed rightly that its successors would be no better. As E.M. Forster wrote in an introduction to the Prince's stories: 'they stumble blindly into a world which they cannot understand but are capable of damaging.'
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