Sciascia Leonardo — The Day of the Owl [126]

It was like a barbed wire entanglement, a wall. The thief who had done time, was involved with the mafia, negotiated extortionate loans and played the informer asked only to find a hole in the wall, a gap in the barbed wire. If he did, he would soon raise enough capital to open his little shop; his elder son he would put into a seminary, either to become a priest or leave before ordination to become, better than a priest, a lawyer. Once over the wall the law would no longer hold terrors. How wonderful it would be to look back on those still behind the wall, behind the barbed wire. — Sciascia Leonardo, The Day of the Owl, 126

Note

The informer’s image of the law as a wall one must climb over to escape — a perfect inverted mirror of Bellodi’s law-as-justice. The shopkeeper’s fantasy of setting his son up as a priest-or-lawyer is the dream of the man climbing the wall.