“Mafia does not exist.”
Pages to be framed. Take them one by one and wallpaper the walls of Italian schools, so as to remain fixed in one way or another in the minds of the students, even the most distracted.
If you have already read Carlo Levi, here we are faced with something completely different, such as the structure and history of the story, the prose and the story and the power of the words remain the same. The lucid social analysis and human nature, in an arid and equally fertile land: Sicily.
The three stories in the text make up the three trips to the island in the early 1950s. The taste of life and of immobile time, stopped a thousand years earlier where only the faces of the masters change, but not those of the peasants and poor people, forced to suffer oppression and abuse, without having the opportunity to react. And when someone tries to raise his head and assert his rights (such as those of land reform, or of direct human working conditions), he is often killed with the silent consent of the representatives of the institutions.
The book oozes with denied justice. Silent lives hanging between saints and small owners who, in order to take care of their small interests, from solfataras to landowners, do not scruple to kill poor wretches, indeed “peasants” as the author himself writes, perhaps taking a cue from Silone’s definition.
The mafia does not exist. This is perhaps a death sentence for an entire population, under the denial of which are hidden the injustices mentioned above. In this regard, the reading of the last chapter of the third story The mirror of an Italy that was and is sick should be made mandatory in all schools, which after seventy years has not made any progress, indeed if possible it is got worse, with the tumor advancing all over the boot.
We are sorry for foreign readers, who will find themselves faced with a translated text, and will lose many of the nuances, and the unspoken of the author suspended between the white spaces between words. A gift that Levi’s pen has given us, and which we do not deserve.
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Carlo Levi, Words are stones, Einaudi, Torino, 1955
