View of the World (34 page)

The stern obligations of the vendetta now fell upon the Mesina family, and ritual vengeance was entrusted to twenty-year-old Graziano, a young man of saturnine good looks and acute intelligence, as he frequently demonstrated in his subsequent trial. At the time of his brother’s death, he was being held by the police in gaol under investigation over a charge of sheep-stealing, and on being told what had happened, he carried out the first of his many gaol-breaks.

The Mesinas had once before been involved in a vendetta. This was the celebrated Great Quarrel – a small war
à outrance
, lasting from 1903 until 1917, conducted between a number of allied families over a
disputed
inheritance. In the course of this, although the Mesinas survived, some families lost all their males – including any children over the age of thirteen. One faction was headed by the town’s priest, the ‘senior father’ of a group of a half-dozen families, a sinister cleric whose popularity in Orgosolo was such that he was accustomed to celebrate Mass with an armed policeman standing on each side. Father Diego Cossu, a rich
man, and an efficient deployer of the power inherent in his position, hit on the ingenious idea of buying the complicity of the police to have his opponents – the Mesinas included – declared bandits. This was effective in terms of short-term policy – perfectly honest citizens, who happened to be the father’s opponents and who decamped in terror, being promptly shot down by the police. In the long run, the plan failed simply because the many fugitives the police failed to imprison, or kill, were transformed into real desperadoes. The Great Quarrel produced several novel situations in the history of outlawry and the vendetta. There were occasions when the police masqueraded as bandits and murdered along with the bandits, and others when bandits dressed up in borrowed uniforms and passed themselves off as police. Some rich sports even formed a band as a diversion from the boredom of hunting and cards – Robin Hoods in reverse, who armed and disguised themselves to rob the poor.

This was the golden age of Orgosolo’s special contribution to the arts, the funeral lament; and Bannedda Corraine, most famous of Orgosolo’s professional mourners, found her vocation when at the beginning of the vendetta her brother died in ambush. She was eighteen years of age and the most beautiful girl in Orgosolo. She sang,

Her laments have the passion and the imagery of the poetry of Garcia Lorca, perhaps occasionally even of the
Song of Songs
, and are still sung at Orgosolo funeral wakes. Some of the figures Bannedda clothed in death in her hyperbole seem unsuitably described. Onorato Succu – ‘the golden-eyed flower’ he was to become in death – was a bald, middle-aged man of repellent ugliness, who had committed twenty cold-blooded murders, and had made no attempt to stop a lieutenant from strangling two thirteen-year-old children of the enemy clan – ‘to save an effusion of innocent blood’ the man said, when asked why he had not shot them.

There has always been a class of professional peacemakers in Orgosolo, whose office it is to compose the differences of warring families
when things appear to be getting out of hand. This they usually do by arranging a marriage between suitable members of the opposing parties. Such a traditional marriage of convenience was once attempted in the Great Quarrel, but was quashed by the macabre Father Cossu who objected that as all the families were related, the laws of consanguinity would be endangered by the proposed solution. However, with the
near-extermination
of family after family, peace had to come in the end and when it did, it was the relief of all Italy. The petty slaughter in Sardinia had been an unpleasant distraction to a nation in arms, absorbed with the patriotic holocausts of the First World War. Seven bandits, who had been in prison six years awaiting trial, were pronounced innocent and released as a gesture of good will on the authorities’ side. A celebratory banquet at Orgosolo followed at which the survivors were reconciled. It was graced by the presence of the Prefect of Sassari, the Bishop of Nuoro, a member of parliament, numerous police officers and the richest of the local landed gentry. Civic dignitaries and men who had committed multiple homicide with huge prices still on their heads, embraced and got drunk together. Mesina’s grandfather knelt with the rest to receive the Bishop’s blessing, but nothing is recorded of his action in the vendetta. He was one of the small fry who had served without distinction or notice in the band led by the golden-eyed flower.

On November 3rd, 1962, the day after Giovanni Mesina’s death, the body was taken to the Mesina house for the lying-in-state. Here, with all the members of the family present, the professional mourners entered the room and began their dirge. Only in the last verse, after a recital of the virtues of the dead bandit, of his strength, his charity, his courage, and his manly beauty, came the moment so long awaited: the shrieking denunciation by the leading wailing-woman of the name of the man held responsible for his death. However much this may have been common knowledge beforehand, the mourners would have kept up a ritual pretence of their ignorance of the killer’s identity until this moment. But now, against the sobbing of the women of the household and the shrieks of the corps of wailers, the calls for vengeance were heard. This is the moment when the death sentence of the family
council is entrusted to the member or members of the family most fitted to carry it out.

In a large clan well-supplied with vigorous males, the execution will take the classic form – a purely Sardinian variation on the theme of the vendetta in which the honour and responsibility is shared by several volunteers. These, because justice should be seen to be done, choose a public place to approach their victim, draw him aside, whisper his sentence to him, and shoot him down. Instantly, the streets empty, passers-by slip into obscure alleyways and disappear. Doors and windows close. Nobody has seen or heard anything. The town averts its head and acquiesces in its muteness in what has happened. But a small family like the Mesinas must cut its coat according to its cloth. The only suitable male – if one exists at all – may have emigrated, or he may even be in gaol. When the news of his brother’s death reached Graziano Mesina, he was in prison, held as a suspect. By feigning madness, he had himself transferred to the prison infirmary, and from this he easily escaped and made for the region of Orgosolo.

For ten days he scoured the bandit hideouts, the caves and grottoes on Supramonte searching for the men who had killed his brother. Failing to find them, he decided to enter the town itself and arrived there on November 13th just after dark. He was incited by others, the prosecution said at his trial, to do what he did.

He was seen by a number of people that evening as he walked up the narrow, badly lit main street. His appearance must have been dramatic indeed, for despite the presence of a strong body of police in the town, he was armed to the teeth including the inevitable hand-grenades and
sub-machine
-gun, and it was evident to the bystanders from his ‘iron face’, as they described it, that he was about to accomplish a ‘mission of honour’.

Mesina went into the town’s principal bar almost opposite the town hall, which is hardly larger than a cell and furnished with a few shelves carrying bottles of wine and cognac, an enormous refrigerator and three low tables with even lower bench-seats about nine inches high. Antonio, the bar’s proprietor, was refilling a row of the tiny wine glasses used in Orgosolo. ‘As he came in our eyes met, and I knew what he had come for,’
he says. Mesina said nothing. He simply gestured with his machine-gun, and the patrons quietly left their tables and lined up against the wall. Among them was Giovanni Muscau, twenty-two-year-old brother of Giuseppe Muscau. Mesina believed Giuseppe to have been Mattu’s friend and protector and to have ordered the killing of his brother, and so – as Giuseppe could not be reached – he had decided to make do with Giovanni. Graziano beckoned to Giovanni Muscau to leave the men standing against the wall, shoved him against the bar with the barrel of his gun, and then fired two bursts into his chest. Muscau slid to the ground and Mesina gave him a final burst as he lay there.

Now Mesina turned to leave and the incredible happened. The custom of Orgosolo absolutely forbids interference in a vendetta by outsiders, and even recommends an onlooker, who believes a vendetta killing to be about to take place, to throw himself face downwards on the ground, to avoid seeing, and therefore being capable of identifying the assailant. The deed is done; the women draw their black veils over their faces, the men slip away into the shadows, the executioners pocket their weapons and disappear.

In this case, to the astonishment of all Sardinia, what happened was that as Mesina turned to leave the bar, someone picked up a bottle and struck him on the head from behind. He fell to the ground, stunned, and was then overpowered and handed over to the carabinieri. This was a break with the past indeed, and the notables of the town are said to have shaken their heads in consternation at what was regarded as evidence of the moral corruption of their young men. Terrible reprisals were predicted but, so far, the Mesina faction seems to have been content to bide its time. Memories are long in vendetta country and it is nothing for a man to nurse his private vengeance for ten years or more – even to appear to have become reconciled to his enemy – while he awaits the right time and place for the settlement of the score.

A few days after my arrival in Sardinia, Graziano Mesina stood up in the iron cage, in which he had been kept like an animal in the courthouse of Cagliari, to hear sentence passed upon him. This conclusion of the sanguinary episode in the bar at Orgosolo had been long deferred because, in the meantime, Mesina had broken Italian records by escaping from five
different gaols and one prison hospital. He had never used the slightest violence in these evasions, nor had he attempted to avoid re-arrest. Throughout the trial, he had shown no more than the mildest curiosity in what was going on, ‘the master’ – as one report put it – ‘of a sphinx-like imperturbability.’ When asked why he had killed the innocent young Muscau, Mesina considered the question for a moment and said, ‘It was his brother Giuseppe I was after. I thought that by killing Giovanni I might tempt him down from the mountains to settle accounts with me.’

Present to hear this admission along with a great contingent from Orgosolo, the women with their black veils drawn half across their faces, the men in stiff dark suits kept for trials and funerals, was none other than the famous Giuseppe himself. Giuseppe Muscau had been captured and put on trial for banditry a year or so before, and as happens in about two such cases out of three, he had been acquitted for lack of sufficient proof. He is now unofficially the town’s leading citizen, described as the possessor of great dignity and charm as well as something of a poet, and the highest honour Orgosolo can confer upon a visitor is to arrange for a presentation to the great man.

Giuseppe’s demeanour on this occasion remained stolidly unrevealing, matching in every way in correctness by the standards of Orgosolo that of the protagonist in the dock. Both men were in the eye of a critical public. One supposed that one day if things hadn’t changed by then, it would be Giuseppe’s sacred duty, or that of his son, to kill Mesina – but it would be many, many years before that day could arrive. Only once Mesina was stirred from his apparent indifference. This happened when the Public Prosecutor suggested in his final speech that Mesina had killed a helpless and unarmed lad because he had been afraid to confront this smallish, mild-looking, middle-aged man sitting there with bowed head and clasped hands in the body of the court. Mesina smiled.

The defence’s only hope was to extricate him from the ultimate calamity of a life sentence, and the strategy employed was an uphill struggle to create sympathy for a man who clearly hadn’t had much of a chance in Orgosolo’s battle for survival. ‘The negative circumstances of his childhood’, as the defence counsel called them were enumerated.
Graziano Mesina had been orphaned at the age of twelve, and then a few years later, the family suffered ‘moral and economic disintegration as a result of the arrest of the three adult brothers who were kept two years in prison on suspicion of murder before it was decided to release them as innocent. Graziano had had to support his mother and sisters through the long months of misery and near starvation. Then came the Townley affair, and the eldest brother’s death. ‘Don’t think of Graziano Mesina as a cold-blooded murderer,’ his counsel pleaded. ‘He’s just an impulsive headstrong boy, incapable of premeditation.’ He gave a few instances of Mesina’s typically impulsive actions such as tearing down the sheepfold of a man who had killed his dog, and then, perhaps to demonstrate that his client was essentially reasonable, recalled Mesina’s protest earlier in the trial: ‘After all, the younger brother was in the bar as well, and I might have finished him off too while I was about it. But there was no question of that. One was enough.’

A psychologist’s report was read out in court, which described Mesina as legally sane and of above average intelligence, although egocentric and remarkable for his ‘moral coldness’. Sentence of twenty-six years was then passed, and the judge added that only a consideration for the special social climate, of which the prisoner was a product, had prevented him from sending him to gaol for life. Emotional scenes are not unusual in Italian courts at moments like this, but here Orgosolo dominated in its taciturn acceptance of victory or defeat. The sombre men and women in the public gallery got up and filed away in silence. No one looked again in the direction of the prisoner still standing motionless and expressionless, hands clasped behind his back in the cage, waiting for the chains to be fastened on him.

On the cross-country journey to Orgosolo, one need only leave the main coastal road at Cagliari to experience an immediate transition from a familiar to an alien civilisation. In a matter of minutes, the Bruegel-like world of the laborious peasant bent over his crops, is left behind, and one finds oneself enclosed without warning in noble and arid landscape, devoid of humanity. In this hard air, details of rock, tree and ruin are
painted with gothic exactitude; rusted ferrous earth is relieved with the greyish green of oaks; sun-flayed mountains lie all along the horizon; there are no isolated houses, no small villages; an occasional town like Santu Lussurgiu is the site of an ancient nomad encampment built where precious water gushes miraculously from a rock. Besides the flinty chatter of wheatears and the occasional screaming of an eagle, there is an omnipresent sound that is at once gay and sinister. This is the lively discord of bells – all of different tones – as a flock of goats goes by. They come through the dark bloodily red trunks of the cork-oaks at a quick, stealthy trot moving as fast as a man can walk. One knows that the shepherd is there too slipping from tree to tree, or out of sight over the lip of a ravine, or behind the rocks; never coming into view. The sensation is an uncomfortable one remembering that there is nothing of the meekness of the shepherd of Christian parable in this man, that he is a cruel, hungry dreamer with a gun, and that in this austere, archaic world where human life counts for so little, the shepherd is often separated by a hair’s breadth from the bandit.