Ignazio Silone’s Fontamara is a story of deceit and
injustice. The cafoni of Fontamara face lies and swindles at every turn
throughout the story. The upper class landowners constantly take advantage of
the cafoni’s lack of education by swindling them out of land, and money for
taxes while the cafoni are left completely helpless.
The first instance of deceit
presented in Fontamara is when Hon.
Pelino convinces the cafoni to sign a phony petition. The contract turns out to
be a con. As the plot continues, the presence of deceit grows larger, for
example, the scene where the cafoni confront Don Circostanza at his villa. The
cafoni are upset that the landowners are taking their irrigation water, and a
drunken Don Circostanza draws up a phony compromising promising three fourths
of the water supply to both parties. However, the due to the cafoni’s lack of
education, they agree to the compromise once again not knowing what they are
signing off for. Eventually, the deceit grows into symptoms of a totalitarian
regime, in this case Mussolini’s. Some examples are the ban on arguing and the
curfew imposed on the Fontamaresi.
Another very interesting moment in
the novel is when Berardo compares the cafoni to donkeys. He claims, “A donkey
requires a certain amount of stray but will not argue…it just doesn’t
understand (or pretends not to understand). A cafone can be persuaded…to go
without food…to give his life away to his master” (Silone 79). Berardo’s
metaphor is repeated throughout the entire story. The cafoni of Fontamara are
stuck in an endless cycle where, when they don’t stand up for their rights,
they are ignored. When they do stand up for their rights they are deceived,
ridiculed and stepped on. The more the cafoni argue, the more the landowners
and the carabinieri play them.
After reading your blog post, I have this questions arose in my head: are you proposing a paradox (or cycle, in your word), where the cafoni are in the situation where they can't fight for themselves or remain being stepped on? This is a plausible explanation, but I think the book is expressing more than just the ideology of "the reproduction of the class system". In my opinion, by describing how when people act in groups, they can commit cruel sins without really noticing how brutal they really are (for example, historically the KKK party whose members believe they were doing justice for the wrold and they were depersonalized and act as a group) Silone proposed that Fascism can also be displayed in conflicts among different classes, not only in contexts that are traumatic enough to be categorized as genocides.
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