Sciascia Leonardo — The Day of the Owl [184]

The captain, on the contrary, had felt a sudden, sombre sense of discouragement; of disillusion, helplessness. That name or ingiuria or whatever it was, was finally out; but it had only come out at the second when the sergeantmajor had suddenly seemed to become for her a terrifying threat of inquisition, of condemnation. Maybe she had remembered the name from the very moment her husband had uttered it and not forgotten it at all. Or else her sudden desperate fear had brought it back. Anyway, without the sergeantmajor, without that ominous transformation of his from a fat, jovial man to the incarnation of menace, they might never have got the name out of her. — Sciascia Leonardo, The Day of the Owl, 184

Note

Bellodi’s central dilemma rendered precisely: the ‘proof’ he obtains is tainted because it was produced by intimidation, so its evidentiary value is poisoned at the source. The narrator spells out that the captain cannot accept a truth extracted by the very violence he opposes — the third-party mechanism corrupted at the moment of its success.