The life I then felt to be the real one, the dream life, was still enveloping me, and I wanted to declare it: ‘Because they don’t know anything yet.’

But then I went quiet and withdrew into silence. The window by my bed was getting light, and by that light I immediately sensed I shouldn’t recount that dream, as the shame of it had to be concealed. But soon, as the sunlight, so light blue and soft, but pressing, went on flooding the room, I no longer even felt that shame. Dream life wasn’t my life, and I wasn’t the man who had grovelled and been ready to sacrifice his own daughter to save himself.

But the return to that horrendous cave had to be avoided. And it is thus that I became submissive and conformed eagerly to the doctor’s diet. If, through no fault of mine – that is, as a result not of excessive libation but of the final fever – I should have to return to that cave, I would immediately jump into that glass chest, if it’s there, to keep from grovelling and to keep from being a traitor.

‘Vino generoso’

First published in the journal La fiera letteraria (28 August 1927). It was then included in the collection La novella del buon vecchio e della bella fanciulla e altri scritti (Morreale, 1929).

Leonardo Sciascia

1921–89

Sciascia assembled a volume of thirteen short stories in the final decades of his life and called it Il mare colore del vino (The Wine-dark Sea), invoking the Homeric epithet. One of Sicily’s most celebrated public intellectuals, he was born in the province of Agrigento, where magnificent Greek temples still stand, and the island was his subject from beginning to end. He wrote about its people, its politics, its beauty and its corruption, its Mafia violence, its rich cultural history, its incantatory effect. He explored the island’s relationship, always fraught, to the rest of Italy, and he tackled, with a combination of compassion and steely documentation, the great theme of justice. Sciascia confronted the major controversies and cataclysmic events of his day, including Italian terrorism, writing cogently about the abduction and assassination of Aldo Moro, a former prime minister of Italy, during the 1970s. In addition to writing essays and political and investigative journalism, he composed a series of tough, terse novels that elevated crime fiction to a high literary form. Il giorno della civetta (The Day of the Owl) and A ciascuno il suo (To Each His Own), among his most famous novels, are two exemplary works of concision. Before he became a full-time writer he taught in elementary school. He was elected to the Palermo city council in 1976 with Communist Party support, and was also a member of the European Parliament. The stories in Il mare colore del vino were published between 1959 and 1972 in various newspapers and magazines. In the author’s note to the collection, which he arranged in order of publication, he speaks of the satisfaction of assembling the book in spite of his ‘general and continuous dissatisfaction’. Sciascia’s sentences are rich and dark like the sea he invokes, his figurative language precise and unnerving. This story has a mythic grace to it, and takes us where we least expect.