ANDREA CAMILLERI An interview with a literary legend

One reason why I liked your jargon was because many words you use exist also in Maltese, like inzirtari, scantatu, addunari, also phrases like “Cu nasci tunnu ‘un po moriri quatratu”...

Sicilian author ANDREA CAMILLERI (1925-2019) passed away in Rome on Wednesday at the age of 93. In view of the literary giant’s demise, Mark A. Sammut revisits an interview he conducted with Camilleri at the author’s apartment in Rome back in February 2000

Born in 1925 at Porto Empedocle, in Sicily, Andrea Camilleri is one of Italy’s top authors. When still a young man, he moved to Rome, where he soon established himself in the television industry as a scriptwriter and director.

Camilleri hit the literary scene at a relatively advanced age, mainly because his style took long to be accepted. His works include the best-selling Commis

sario Montalbano series, which has been televised by RAI TV for the last 20 years, and historical novels with pungent satirical overtones relevant to contemporary Sicilian and Italian society. They are all set in the imaginary Vigàta of the 20th or 19th century.

Camilleri was of distant Maltese origins and this attracted my attention when, back in 1998, I was travelling from Florence to Rome. At the Florence railway station I noticed a tascabile (a pocket-sized paperback) penned by one Andrea Camilleri. The name struck me, for my first impression was that one of my compatriots had published a novel in Italy.

My intuition was not wholly wrong, for in La Strage Dimenti

cata Camilleri claims that his family, like the Buhagiars, the Attards, and others, descended from Maltese immigrants at Porto Empedocle, the port close to Agrigento.

My fascination with the author was instantaneous. Not only because of the Maltese connection, but also because of the unique admixture of Italian and Sicilian and the persistent recurrence of Sicilian loanwords in our own language. If the average Italian finds it tough to understand at first blush words such as tabbuto, ad

dunnari, inzertari, and so on, for us it certainly is not.

In November 1999, I wrote a letter to the Maestro, and on Christmas eve of that year I received a reply from him, inviting me to pay him a visit in his Rome apartment.

In February 2000, I was in Rome, and together with an Italian friend, visited him in his Rome residence, a tastefully-furnished top-floor apartment. He showed us to the sitting room, and, in the company of two espressos for us and a beer for the maestro, the interview (in Italian) began:

What is your family’s connection with Malta?

A great number of Maltese settled in Sicily in the past. I do not know how or when. Among them were the Camilleris. We certainly have Maltese origins. I will say how later. There were also the Cassars, the Buhagiars, the Hamels, the Attards or Attardis. Among the latter was the great Italian sculptor and painter who added i to his surname.

A friend of mine unearthed a document going back to the end of the 17th century. It was a navigational paper, released from Malta as a departure clearance. In the name of God and of Our Lady, it certified that the crew of the threemasted ship, owned and captained by Captain Giuseppe Camilleri, crew members: Attard and Hamel, and a clean bill of health. This was perhaps meant to avoid quarantine in (Molo di) Girgenti, today known as Porto Empedocle. The papers specify that the cargo was drapery – a lot of silk smuggling was then carried out between Malta and Sicily.

Then I followed the names in my family: Andrea, Stefano, Giuseppe, Carmelo. All names that recur in my family tree.

When I worked for RAI I received many letters from Malta. People there evidently watched my programmes. Once I even got a telephone call from the Maltese Embassy saying that a young nephew of Dom Mintoff’s wished to visit the RAI studios. I managed to take him around with great difficulty because it was not easy to take a boy around. After that we bade farewell and that was that.

Did you ever visit Malta?

Never. My daughter, the middle one, came to Malta for a month. She said there were myriad Camilleris there.

How does a Sicilian living in Rome perceive Malta?

Well.,. there is one thing that ought to be said at the outset. There is a common insularity, both in the major and in the minor case. We are all islanders. Before air connections, we had to cross over by boat... isolation was more real. I have always thought of two concentric circles within which my distant provenance took place. Now, this is the end of my voyage.

My residence in Rome, though lasting over 50 years, is of a casual nature. I do not consider myself a Roman. I continue being a Sicilian in all senses, though not according to certain traditional prototypes. Indeed had I not been Sicilian, I would have been unable to write have I have written.

May we consider Vigata a fictional Porto Empedocle?

Well, how shall I put it? It is Porto Empedocle with a variable architecture, in the sense that the confines of the place expand and condense themselves. Vigàta is an artefact based on Porto Empedocle. It all goes back to a sort of collected memories from childhood or early youth.

You see, the only lyceum in the province then... the nearest that is – for if I remember correctly there was another at Sciacca but that was too far away – was in Agrigento. So every morning, school buses left from the neighbouring villages – Giardiano Galloni, Racalmuto, RAffadali – carrying schoolchildren to the town square where they assembled at 8 a.m. outside the lyceum building. School started at 8:30 a.m.

During that half-hour, the boys related what had occurred in the various villages the day before. The impression was created that we all lived in one common village. This is how Vigàta was born. That was Vigàta’s coming to life: the end result of common events and memories. Where the physical aspect of it is concerned is a secondary matter.

How far was your writing influenced by those two great Sicilian writers, Lampedusa and Sciascia, in your re-creation of Sicily?

I was hardly influenced by Giuseppe di Lampedusa because I do not like his novel ( Il

Gattopardo / The Leopard) at all. You must recall that two other great Sicilian writers, Elio Vittorini and Leonardo Sciascia, too, did not like him. Lampedusa’s thesis – which is known as Gattopardismo – is based on the model set by the Salina princes who opted out of Italian history regardless of the Piedmontese invitation to participate in post-Unification national life. Indeed this points to the reasons behind Sicily’s subjugation.

As far as Sciascia is concerned, I admire his use of the language which he wields like a wellhoned sword, and the control he exercised over his writing which is coloured by reason. As for myself, I try to follow reason and half-way through I become angry and lose control.

Having said that, I must add that before starting a novel, before I set out on any important writing, I pick up a book by Sciascia, the first one I find around, and read it. It is like going to my car electrician to charge my car battery. Sciascia, for some mysterious reason, charges my batteries, enabling me to take up my pen and start writing. This is my honest relationship with Sciascia.

Would you care to comment on the anecdote you mention in one of your books the – relationship between Pirandello and your grandmother?

Yes. We must go back to 1935, a year before Pirandello’s demise. I was a child of ten, an only son in the family. At that time there were no telephone in my town, hardly any means of communication. At best, the maidservant would inform us of an imminent visit to the house. The servant would then announce: “Tomorrow, Signora so-and-so would like to call...” This setting explains what happened.

Pirandello had dictated in 1911 the wording of an inscription to be affixed on the building of the new schools which were being set up. You must remember that 1911 was the 50th anniversary of the Unification of Italy. This splendid inscription, dictated to his brother while writing the famous I Vecchi e i Giovani, referred to the two peoples (the mainland, and particularly the northern Italians, and the Sicilians) as “uniti si vollero sotto il comune segno di Roma” which is abundantly ambiguous in that you can interpret the situation of the two peoples in two ways: first, “they wanted to be united under the common mark of Rome,” or else, “united as they were, they came under the common mark of Rome”. In other

This does not happen only in Maltese. Sometimes, French or Spanish translators say: “But these are our words.” What do they mean? When have they been to Sicily?

A concept that has struck me in your works is the concept of being “omu”. It is uncannily similar to the Maltese concept of “irġulija”. What does “omu” mean to a Sicilian?

In Sciascia’s Il giorno della civetta, the Mafia boss says to the Police Chief: “Men are divided into categories: the omu, the sottomu, the ominicchio, the piglianculu, and the

quaquaraquà. Omini are very few, sottomini many – and I would be very happy if humanity stopped there – the ominicchi have perhaps half the form of the omini but they are not omini, the piglianculu who, with all due respect, have become legion and the quaquaraquà are geese who wallow in the pool crying out quaquaraquà...”

“And what am I?” asked the Police Chief.

“You are a man – an omu.” By this he means that the Police Chief is a man of his word. When you hear Totò Riina slamming Buscetta saying “He has lovers” he is not speaking about morals but in the sense of the “omu” – “You have given your word but not kept it”. “Omu” is he who fully respects the word he has given as well as the rules of the game. He who does not stoop so low as “to hoodwink” others. This is the basic concept of “man” for a Sicilian.

In some cases Montalbano needs only to cast a look in order to be understood by a fellow agent, because friendship does not need words. What is this Sicilian friendship?

Sicilian friendship, I have once written, is a different art. I took as an example the correspondence that passed between Luigi Pirandello and his great friend Nino Martoglio. Martoglio was a great impresario as well as a film director. The letters they exchanged are today somewhat embarrassing. “I kiss you on the mouth with great love” they would write. A phrase no one would today dare put down in writing. But does this mean they were gay? No, they were friends, real friends. So, in this sense, friendship is more meaningful than love, a more powerful feeling.

In 1960, I happened to stage an opera by Donizetti, who was from Bergamo. I called an old Sicilian actor, Turi Pandolfini, who had worked with Pirandello and Martoglio for many years. I said: “Turi, Pirandello and Martoglio, did they speak during rehearsals?” “Ahem, they held conversations between them.” “And what they did say tell one another?” “Nun lu sacciu – I do not know.” “How do you mean? Where you there or not?” “I was there, ma nun lu sacciu.” The reason Turi never found out what they said was that they never spoke with their mouths but with their eyes. I once wrote an article on this phenomenon in a German paper: “Why Sicilians speak with their eyes.” It is self-defence. It is quite clear that theirs is a non-verbal language. In Italy we had an example of it thanks to a video in which a Mafia boss talks to his wife by gazing at her while making little gestures saying that what he meant was totally different from what he was going to utter in words. I saw this on RAI TV.

Friendship is so deep that a friend need not ask anything of his friend because his friend must understand even before the request is made. If the other is obliged to express himself in words, it means the friendship between the two is less than perfect.

Pirandello’s fabulous friendship with Martoglio is interrupted by a letter from Pirandello who says: “Dear friend, last night you said a word to me which you ought not have said. Not only that, it was a word I would have never expected you to say at all.” Thus a ten-yearold friendship came to an abrupt end. Just for one word. I never found out what the word was. But those two knew it.

Montalbano is the same. He knows that Mimì Augello is his friend. He knows that Sicilian friendship is made of long silences. Vincenzo Gonzo once went to see his friend Sciascia. The latter’s secretary, dumbfounded, would later say: “They have been there for one hour, without talking.” They were talking. Only she could not understand. Ha! Ha!

Only among men?

Only among men.

What about women? How is friendship among women?

I do not think it exists among women. In recent years, maybe. Once I was in Saudi Arabia and I happened to see them wearing muzzles of gold and silver. They simply could not speak. I saw three or four, extremely rich and wonderful, but unable to speak. They literally carried great loads of diamonds and jewellery, you know.

Once I saw one of these muzzled ladies signalling to her equally rich husband to follow her around. She was muzzled but she could still make herself understood by her husband.

That is why we say that we have removed the muzzle from our ladies and have invited them to sit down at table with us but still they speak among themselves. Ha! Ha!

That is also why Montalbano has a true female friend who is Swedish. As Eliot says, women come and go speaking of Michelangelo, but only among themselves.

What hopes do you see for Sicily’s future?

Many. If the Third World decides to do something. It is one of the most sincere replies I can give to such a question. I do not have high hopes where Europe is concerned. I can see hopes for Sicily’s future coming from Africa, from the Mediterranean littoral. From that direction yes, I do see hopes.