A Man's Blessing by Leonardo Sciascia

First published:A ciascuno il suo, 1966 (English translation, 1968)

Type of work: Detective/sociological realism

Time of work: From August, 1964, to September, 1965

Locale: A village in western Sicily, near Agrigento

Principal Characters:

• Paolo Laurana, a professor of Italian and history at the liceo Agrigento
• Manno, a pharmacist, assassinated while hunting
• Roscio, a doctor, killed at the same time as his friend, Manno
• Luisa, Roscio’s wife and Rosello’s lover
• Rosello, a lawyer, a Christian Democratic politician, a cousin of Luisa and also her lover

The Novel

The bodies of Manno and Roscio are found lying in a field, shot to death at close range. The victims had been out hunting that day; their game is now spilled out on the ground. The clues are sparse: Practically none exist save for a Branca cigar stub found near the bodies.

Several days before the murder, Manno had received a threatening letter, pasted together with words from a newspaper. People naturally assume that the crime is one of passion and speculate that Manno either seduced a girl or had an extramarital affair. It is unfortunate that his hunting companion Roscio was also killed; he simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The police make a full investigation, gather a list of suspects, and even film everybody that attends the victims’ funerals; but ultimately, they give up.

Yet the crime intrigues Paolo Laurana, a high-school teacher, who embarks on his own investigation, fueled by intellectual curiosity. Laurana has little desire to bring the guilty parties to trial, much less denounce them to the police: “Laurana had a kind of obscure pride which made him decisively reject the idea that just punishment should be administered to the guilty one through any intervention of his.” Laurana deduces that the printed words pasted on the anonymous letter had been clipped from the Vatican newspaper, L’osservatore Romano, and he discovers that only two people in town receive subscriptions to the publication. Both are churchmen: one a dean, the other a rector. Since many others had access to these editions or could have obtained copies elsewhere, however, the clue, although interesting, leads to a dead end.

Hoping to obtain a suggestive reaction, Laurana reveals what he has discovered at an informal gathering at a local men’s club that he frequents, but all that his announcement does is to alert the unknown guilty party to Laurana’s activities. Laurana continues his investigation. He is convinced that the person who arranged the killing was somebody well-known to one of the victims, because hunters usually keep the place where they are planning to go hunting secret, especially on the opening day of the season. The murderer was therefore a friend, and a nonhunting friend at that.

The next important bit of information comes to Laurana by chance. The following month, he happens to be in Palermo supervising school examinations when he runs into an old school friend, a Communist legislator, who tells him about a visit he received from Roscio several weeks before the murders. Roscio had wanted to find out if the politician would officially denounce, on the floor of the Parliament and in his party’s newspapers, a prominent person from his village, one who “made men, unmade them, stole, bribed, swindled.” From this conversation, Laurana deduces that the assassination of Manno was merely a smoke screen for the real target. In a subsequent conversation with the rector of the church of Sant’Anna, he discovers that the man who most fits Roscio’s description is Rosello, the lawyer. The possibility is confirmed when, again by chance, Laurana runs into Rosello outside the Palace of Justice in the company of a politician and a rather suspicious-looking character who smokes Branca cigars, the brand discovered at the scene of the crime. Laurana investigates the identity of the stranger and finds that he is a professional hit man named Ragana.

Laurana no longer doubts the identity of the guilty man, but he is still unsure of the motive. Most plausibly, it seems that Rosello and his victim’s wife are lovers, not merely cousins, and that her husband’s death would clear the way for a marriage to reunite the family fortunes. Still, Laurana cannot bring himself to believe that such an attractive woman as Luisa could be part of such a horrendous scheme. With great relief, he welcomes her confidence, which is made in the course of a supposedly chance encounter on the bus going to Agrigento, that she also has suspicions of Rosello and believes that he played a part in killing her husband. Luisa tells Laurana that she wants to meet him secretly to discuss what they should do, and they arrange to meet in Agrigento at the Cafe Romeris, an out-of-the-way restaurant.

Laurana arrives early, but Roscio’s widow never appears. Finally, after more than two hours of fruitless waiting, he leaves in order to catch the last train back to his village. On the way to the station, a car driven by somebody he recognizes from his village offers him a ride. It is a set up, and Laurana is killed. His body is thrown down an abandoned sulfur mine, halfway between the county seat and his town.

After the customary year of mourning, Luisa announces her betrothal to Rosello. The arrangement merely confirms the suspicions of the town about Rosello’s role in the murder. These villagers already knew what Laurana had merely suspected, that Rosello and Luisa had been having an affair and that Roscio had caught them in bed together. In addition, they had been informed that Roscio had threatened to make public incriminating evidence of Rosello’s illegal activities. The outraged husband had also delivered an ultimatum that Rosello should leave the village and never return. Laurana’s mysterious disappearance did not surprise them either, because he obviously did not know enough to keep silent. He was clearly a fool.

The Characters

Laurana is not the stereotypical detective. Although he shares with his fictional counterparts a talent for organization and persistence, he has taken to sleuthing primarily out of a sense of academic arrogance and a need for diversion. He has lived in his village his entire life, in a house with his mother—an imposing woman who still rules over her offspring—whom he refuses to leave even to move closer to the school where he teaches. Despite being a local, it is clear that he does not know much about the community in which he lives, specifically about the village’s power structure or about the personal relations of its inhabitants, common knowledge in a community of that sort.

Although Laurana’s prime suspect is someone whom he encounters routinely in his daily life, the detective has to be told about Rosello’s activities by a priest. His criminal investigation is a model of the scholarly detachment befitting his occupation, but it lacks comprehension of human nature. It becomes a manifestation of hubris that, as in Greek tragedy, leads to fatal consequences. Laurana is in over his head and completely unable to appreciate the villainy of such a man as Rosello or the languorous amoral complicity of Rosello’s mistress, Luisa. This village, after all, is a society in which the women are not actors but do the bidding of men. Laurana’s search for truth comes too late to save him or affect the society of which he is a victim.

Rosello is more attuned to reality than is Laurana: The lawyer best epitomizes Sicily’s “madmen, its high-noon and nocturnal demons, its oranges and its sulphur and its booted up corpses.” He is a person whom others in the village can respect and to whom they can closely relate. He is ruthless, powerful, and active. He serves on the board of directors of an important company; as a legal consultant for yet another; as a corporation president; and as the Christian Democratic representative on the provincial council who was instrumental in torpedoing an alliance with the Fascists and promoting one with the Socialists.

Rosello remains as murky and distant but as ever-present, as the landscape in which he operates and the village over which he holds sway. He is a man of great personal charm and intellect, equally at home with a hired assassin such as Ragana and men of breeding such as that “eternal fountain of culture” the Honorable Abello, who bests Laurana in a bit of literary repartee, much to Rosello’s amusement.

Rosello is a great dissembler who remains friendly with Roscio even while plotting his murder. His neglect in covering his tracks comes from his confidence that nobody would dare give him away or that if somebody were stupid enough to investigate him, that person could always be eliminated. His is a different kind of willful pride, but one based on reality.

These two central characters—Laurana and Rosello—are different aspects of the Sicilian personality: the timid, intellectual, aloof scholar; the hard, cruel, practical politician. They pose for the others the fundamental question of what a decent man should do in an immoral situation. The answer suggested by the outcome is that people should keep their mouths shut, trust nobody, and have more reverence for killers than for their victims.

Critical Context

If the greater sin produces a greater redemption, Sciascia seems to be saying that Sicilian society will go no further than the sin. He is not alone in pointing out this aspect of Sicily, which forms the theme of much of the literature to come from that unhappy island.

In his book Il gattopardo (1958; The Leopard, 1960), Sciascia’s fellow countryman Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa has his main character, Don Fabrizio, decline an offer made to him by an official of the new government to become a senator, by explaining that the Sicilian mentality is conditioned by a death wish, that Sicilians never want to improve because “they think themselves perfect,” that they want to sleep and will always “hate anyone who tries to wake them, even in order to bring them the most wonderful of gifts.”

Sciascia perpetuates this attitude, but in doing so, he has taken the older literary styles and reinterpreted them in a modern idiom. In A Man’s Blessing, he has presented the sociology of a small Sicilian town in the form of a detective novel, making strong use of the local idiom, underlining the closeness of the society, its superstitions, and the prevalence of the community’s fear, solitude, and lack of trust. A Man’s Blessing avoids the direct mention of poverty and deprivation, unlike Le parrocchie di Regalpetra (1956; Salt in the Wound, 1969). His characters are well-placed members of society; nevertheless, they are captives of the island’s misery and backwardness.

Similarly, the Mafia, although not central to the book’s theme, as it is in Il giorno della civetta (1961; Mafia Vendetta, 1963), is present as a state of mind, a synonym for corruption and indifference, and an example of the dead hand of the past controlling the future. Consequently, one mafioso—Rosello—is sufficient to terrorize an entire town.

Benito Mussolini’s prefect, Mori, who waged relentless war against the Mafia during the Fascist period, admitted that with a few battalions of Blackshirts he had driven the Mafia underground, but that this effort was not enough to eradicate its influence: “How can you stamp out what’s in a peoples blood?” In trying to explain what is in his people’s blood, Sciascia has been considered a spokesman for those who, unlike his characters, do not keep silent when they know the truth.

Bibliography

Cattanei, Luigi. Leonardo Sciascia, 1979.

Jackson, Giovanna. Leonardo Sciascia, 1956-1976: A Thematic and Structural Study, 1981.

Mauro, Walter. Sciascia, 1970.

Mitgang, H. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXX (May 12, 1968), p. 40.

Motta, Antonio. Leonardo Sciascia: La verita, L’aspra verita, 1985.