Sciascia Leonardo — The Day of the Owl [29]

The fritter-seller, who was only three yards from the fallen man, sidled off with a crablike motion towards the door of the church. In the bus no one moved; the driver sat, as if turned to stone, his right hand on the brake, his left on the steering-wheel. The conductor looked round the passengers’ faces, which were blank as the blinds. … The conductor looked at the dead man and then at the passengers. These included some women, old women who brought heavy sacks of white cloth and baskets full of eggs every morning; their clothes smelled of forage, manure and wood smoke; usually they grumbled and swore, now they sat mute, their faces as if disinterred from the silence of centuries. — Sciascia Leonardo, The Day of the Owl, 29

Note

The murder witnessed by a full bus and immediately swallowed by collective non-seeing — ‘blank as the blinds,’ the women’s faces ‘disinterred from the silence of centuries.’ This is the novel’s founding image of the witness who does not witness; the piazza full of people who cooperate by not cooperating.