The Avenging Angel

"Two men died that night, and three families are thrown into desolation," said a swarthy Sicilian with set lips one day last week, "but it was a crime of honor, and, praise God, honor is a word still held sacred in Sicily." "Where there is no honor," said his companion in solemn agreement, "there is chaos."

Tucked in a narrow gorge of the mountains some 13 miles from Palermo, the little town of Borgetto knows chaos aplenty when the summer droughts end and the mountain waters, slimy and grey, go roiling and boiling over the cobbles of its main street, the Way of the Deluge, threatening homes and crops alike. But whatever else may suffer in Borgetto, honor-particularly a maid's honoris sacrosanct. No man may fall victim to the lure of dark eyes in a Sicilian village without the certainty of reaping his reward in death or marriage, and the maiden who talks with a man on the street from her chamber window and then lets him stroll out of her life will never find another, for the neighbors will ever after know her as sfrontata, a shameless one.

A Peep at the Window. No one, perhaps, in all Borgetto knew these things better than Antonina, the dark-eyed daughter of grizzled Angelo Polizzi, though she was only twelve years old. In a darkened room Antonina gazed in agony at the drawn slats on her window evening after evening as handsome young Giuseppe Pellerito strolled by on the Way of the Deluge. Were it not for her testy old father, the two might well have looked forward to marriage any spring, but Angelo had laid down the law: Giuseppe at 18 was too old for his daughter. Knowing this, Antonina knew too that even so much as a peep through her window slats would be like a signature on her Giuseppe's death warrant.

But in Sicily love, like honor, is a potent force, and one night when the larks were still in the mountains overhead and the dew was heavy on the cyclamen, Antonina lowered a note from her win dow on a long, silken cord. On it was written the single word "Giuseppe." Giuseppe received it on bended knee, unable to move for sheer adoration. The following Sunday, when Antonina's mother went to waken her daughter, she found her gone. "Those two young doves," said a villager as he told of it later, "had flown." That afternoon when the doves had returned, irate father Polizzi haled Giuseppe Pellerito and his father Salvatore before a court of local elders in the butcher shop for the kind of arbitration known locally as ragionamento. a reasoning-out.

Twelve Shots in a Shop. "The Pelle-ritos have brought witnesses with them, I see," the girl's father told the court, "but alas I need no witnesses. The whole village knows what has happened to my daughter. I demand that Giuseppe marry her." Like Giuseppe himself, Borgetto's elders were all in favor of such a simple solution, but father Pellerito. still chafing over the fact that Polizzi once thought his son not good enough, held out. Hot words followed, until at last Pellerito blurted, "Your Antonina made my son lose his head." "You mean my daughter seduced your son? My little girl seduced your great lout?" screamed father Polizzi, purple with rage. He whipped out a fat revolver and fired twelve shots.

When a carabiniere came at last, Salvatore Pellerito lay dead across the marble stand where meat was sold, one of his witnesses lay riddled with bullets in the doorway, Giuseppe and the other witness were bleeding in the street, and Angelo Polizzi, the avenging angel, had fled to the fortresslike mountains. All week long the law officers searched for him, but the only help they got from the citizens of Borgetto was a snort of contempt. "He is a victim of honor's law, and without honor, there would be no Sicily and no Sicilians," said one old shepherd. "We would become just like other people." And with these words, he spat in the carabiniere's face.

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