There is also the violence of Sicilian history, a history so full of duplicity, subjugation, bloodshed, and despair that the sunny Mediterranean island has produced a society of black-hearted fatalists. In Sicily, says native novelist Leonardo Sciascia, “we ignore the future tense of verbs. We never say, ‘Tomorrow I will go to the country’; we say, ‘Dumani, vaju in compagna’—‘Tomorrow I am going to the country.’ How can you fail to be pessimistic in a country where the future tense of the verb does not exist?”
